Announcing the winner of the 2024 Metro Minds STEAM Challenge

The Metro Minds STEAM Challenge invites students in Year 7 to Year 10 near Sydney Metro’s City & Southwest, West and Western Sydney Airport railway alignments to work together to come up with an innovative solution to an authentic Sydney Metro challenge or opportunity.  

Now in its 6th year the program saw 17 schools and over 400 students across the three alignments participate in the Metro Minds challenge, which included 34 ambassadors from Metro.  

North Sydney Boys High School and the other finalists – Montgrove College, North Sydney Boys High School, Our Lady of Mercy College Parramatta, Parramatta High School and St Clare’s College, Waverley pitched their ideas to a live audience of over 80 people at the Aerial UTS Function Centre on Friday 23 August. The panel of judges - Project Directors Dan Powrie, Alia Karaman, Hugh Lawson and Angela Jeffery – commended the students on their presentations and their innovative ideas. All the judges said it was not easy selecting a winning team.

The winning team’s idea is to develop a robot for track maintenance. They called their innovation, “Purgato, the perfect robot for track maintenance.” They presented a prototype robot and a solution for automating Sydney Metro’s track maintenance. Their presentation pitch included detailed design costs, challenges and future-proofing considerations.

Dr Vladimir TOŠIĆ, Technology (Software Engineering, iSTEM, iPBL), teacher of the winning team, said, “I am proud of my winning team, of course, but I am also proud of all my students who took part in the Metro Minds STEAM Challenge. This program is a learning experience that develops not only students' STEAM knowledge, but more importantly their transferable problem-solving skills, understanding of project management and teamwork, interpersonal and communication skills. One of the key elements of this program is that students meet with and hear directly from Sydney Metro experts who volunteer as program Ambassadors. This learning from industry role models inspires students to study STEM subjects."

The student teams produced a concept brief, video pitch and prototype of their innovation, then presented them to Sydney Metro.

Learn more about our FastTracking the Future education program.