Hi, my name is Sid Verma and I am the founder and Executive Director of BrainSTEM, which
is a not-for-profit organisation that we started in 2016. My wife and I accompanied our son
to attend the world's largest pre-college science competition in the United States.
While we were there, we met students from all over the world, teenagers 14 to 17 years
of age, and they had the most incredible ideas of how they were solving real-world problems.
What about the ones who didn't get a chance to come to this place and talk about their
idea? How far behind are they because of - not because of a lack of idea, but lack of mentoring
and support? The way the BrainSTEM program works is, it is a team-based mentoring program.
We have a team of four students from a high school, year 9, year 10, and they get matched
with an industry mentor or a university, academic mentor, a PhD, a scientist, a person who's
gone through the journey of STEM and have learned through the experiences by making
mistakes, by pushing the boundaries and coming up with something amazing. Design Thinking
is at the core of our program at BrainSTEM and in terms of every program that we actively
run within the organisation. But what we have been doing is that we have been building our
STEM Innovation Challenge but also introducing things like Design Thinking, which is looking
at empathy, problem identification and definition, understanding the person you're trying to
solve the problem for, prototyping, testing, failing and learning from the mistakes and
then ultimately coming up with the solution that generally fits and solves that problem.
Failure is a very important aspect of the BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge because that
is one of the biggest teachers. We actively encourage the students in the BrainSTEM Innovation
Challenge to fail as quickly and as often as possible and to get comfortable with the
idea of failure, but not get used to failure. So to date we've had 450 plus students take
part in the BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge. More than 60% of the participants are girls,
more than 55% of the students are from a low socio-economic or a public school background.
While the BrainSTEM program is all-inclusive, we have a very particular and strong focus
on gender equity. One thing that stood out for us, almost at every program, was the lack
of confidence, the fear of taking risks by girls who are taking part in the program.
What we learned from engaging girls and developing their skills in the BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge
was that the quality of the work, the change in their level of confidence and willingness
to pursue something and giving it a go, that transformation was significant. Almost 95%
of the girls who took part in the program expressed that they would want to go and study
in a STEM-based field, and they would want to continue to work in a STEM-based field.
One of the important components of the BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge is the right mix of student,
academia and industry collaboration. We are now actively looking at adding and industry
partner component to our Innovation Challenge, where industry partners present a real challenge
that they are facing, have the PhDs and universities mentor a team of students from a school to
work and solve that challenge, which means that from an industry partner employee's point
of view, it meets their Corporate Social Responsibility and Employee Engagement, they get to work
with a whole new generation of Australians, they get to work with PhDs in universities
and support a not-for-profit organisation, but also quite possibly look at their future
employees, as PhDs who might want to come and work in the organisation. Now we are four
years into our BrainSTEM initiative, we have run twelve Innovation Challenges. We have
done Design Thinking workshops for teachers by empowering them to go and deliver their own Design
Thinking programs in STEM for their students. We've done Design Thinking programs for schools,
both in metropolitan private schools and public schools. We have done Design Thinking programs
for students, all girls, for the entire year level, to try and build the entire suite of
soft skills that they can take, not just as a part of them as a person developing, but
as a part of applying those in the academic journey through the rest of school. What we
see us doing from now onwards is to bring all this together and scale it up so we can
deliver these programs nationally.