Final year projects impress the judges again in Burnside's Annual Tech Fair.

Burnside High School held its annual year 10 tech fair on the 6th of December. As always, the standard of entries was astounding. There were nearly 90 entries spread out throughout 4 classrooms and hundreds of students were involved in creating projects that ranged from video games to robots and everything in between.

Hundreds of students, parents and teachers were able to walk through and see the amazing work of the students throughout the afternoon making it a memorable highlight for the participants, as they come to the end of their year 10 technology course for 2023.

On top of that, Burnside also invited the senior lecturers from the University of Canterbury’s School of Product Design for a special walk through the following day. All of them were blown away by the level of quality of the projects and jokingly commented that some of them were better than their final year graduate projects!

We all want to thank every one of the participants for their engagement, imagination, and hard work in delivering a project for the Tech Fair and we would love to mention all of you. However, we would be here all day. Instead, here are the top project in each of the four main categories of Electronics, Software Engineering, Product Design and Game Design.

Top in Game Design was an amazingly entertaining and artistically impressive game called Magus by Olly Kitcheman and Benson Lee. It stood above the others with it’s completeness, with every sprite and animation hand drawn by Benson and features coded by Olly including magic, shields, melee, AI and a boss fight level.

The Software Engineering prize went to Alexander Krakowiak and his team who made a strategy game. The impressive feat was not the game (which was amazing) but that the game was created with a custom-made game engine that was created by Alex in Python.

Emma Cox won the Product category with her range of sustainable acrylic jewelry. These were beautifully presented pieces that appealed to everyone and would be a highly marketable product. These are both environmentally friendly, as they can be made with recycled plastics and appealing. There were lots of requests from students and adults to buy some of the pieces!

The Headmaster’s Award and Top in Electronics was a massively ambitious project by Lizzie Howe and Evie Tuck to make an electronic “Connect 4” game. For those who have ever attempted something like this, you will appreciate just how difficult that would be. Lizzie and Evie showed immense potential in technology, tackling all the hardware and software challenges of multi-colored LED arrays, laser cutting, buttons, power management and C++ coding on an Arduino. The result was perfect and was deserving of the top prize.

Once again, congratulations to all the participants and we look forward to seeing what they can make in technology in the following years as they move on to year eleven.