Photos: Australia's IT brains trust of the future

In its fifth year, 520 students with 234 projects competed to be named the best Young ICT Explorers in their region and age group, as judged by industry professionals looking for creativity and technological innovation.

The device identifies an occupied space as well as checking whether the car is a legitimate car-share vehicle. If not, an LED screen issues a warning that the space is only for car-share cars.

If the warning is ignored an email or SMS is sent to parking rangers and the car share scheme administrators.

The project is based around an Arduino microprocessor connected to the internet.

'BitVest' is built entirely in PHP and MYSQL. Within each game, users make strategic deposits. Three percent of each deposit is held by BitVest until enough deposits are made, determined by the time of the round.

Once enough deposits are made in any round, initial deposits receive an 125 percent return on their initial outlay.

(L to R) Justin Williams, SAP Victoria general manager, winning student Jonte de Zwart, teacher Jo Trim.

The robot shooter drives up to the tee and hits the ball and the robot goalie dives across the goal to prevent the ball from scoring.

During the development process, the students discovered that while building the robot was relatively easy, programming the robots required more trial and error in order to ensure the robots reacted appropriately.

(L to R) Dylan Ashford, Aaron Lawn.

The game relies on resources such as Arduinos, Lego Mindstorms, NXT 2.0 plus Lego pieces and 3D printed objects.

(L to R) Students James Bui, Joshua Poon, Ken Gene Quah and Jun Hua Chen.

For example, Buggy could help in the case of a visit to a medical centre. The building receptionist uses Bluetooth to connect to the robot and map out the patient’s route within the building. The sight impaired person can follow the robot, by sound, to the desired destination in the building.

The robot features an ultrasonic sensor providing it with a sense of space. It is able to provide a notification when an object is nearby.

(L to R) NSW finalists Lara Robertson, Lillian Sargent, Isabella Warrand.