The Innovator and their BIG idea

Ella Waterreuss was a Year 12 student at Tauranga Girls’ College with a passion for problem solving and innovation when she came up with the idea of a buoy equipped with a GPS co-ordinate plotter and a thruster powered by solar energy.  Ella said that she was ‘stoked’ when her teacher read out that she had won the People’s Choice Award.

The Internship and what’sup for the future

Ella spent her internship at Bluelab and said that she has been applying what she learned about the design process back in her school, not just targeting the product but also the marketing and innovation components and thinks she will appreciate these skills even more when she is at University in 2020.

Ella said that she had shared her work with her parents as she worked through the design thinking process, and her parents were amazed by the learning opportunities she was getting through YiA.  Ella is now all fired up and ready to enter YiA 2019. Ella’s advice to other students is to definitely give YiA a go. She was quick to point out to fellow students considering entering YiA 2019 that it isn’t about whether you get anywhere or not, but YiA is a tool to learn new things.