St Bede's Catholic College, Chisholm students win Techgirls comp with clever app

St Bede's Catholic College, Chisholm year nine students Ariana Weddell, Isabella Frazer-Mesic, Paige Pannowitz and Ainsley Griffin have been named as one of six winners in the national Techgirls competition.

Tasked with solving a problem in the world, the girls worked hard over 12 weeks to develop an original app, Hydr8.

Hydr8 uses location services to show users where bubblers or hydration stations are on their walking route, and if there are none it will suggest an alternate path.

It aims to improve access to clean drinking water.

"It's an app where you could put in where you will walk to, say you're walking from our school to maybe your house a couple of streets down the road, it would show you what we call hydration stations or bubblers, and it will tell you where you can get free water from," Ainsley said .

They designed, wrote and coded the app themselves, made a budget, and created a business plan and pitch video to go alongside their submission.

Science teacher Rebecca Haines coordinated the school's participation in the competition, and said she's very proud of the girls.

"I was obviously very surprised that they had won, but I also was...they've worked really hard," she said.

"I'm very proud of them and I think next year, now they know how to win, I'd like them now to pass that on to another group."

The competition is for girls from seven to 17-years-old.

The girls were all in charge of different parts of Hydr8, with Ariana and Isabella on design and colours, and Paige on app development.

She used app development platform Thunkable to code and build Hydr8 to be exactly to her liking.

The girls were rewarded for their efforts at assembly last week where they received their prizes - Samsung tablets.

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