Guiding Indigenous students to careers in science and technology

SBS Australia

a day ago

"This has opened my eyes, I think there are a lot of opportunities through STEM and I might try them." That's Akia, a 16-year-old student from an Aboriginal high school who has spent three days problem-solving, prototyping tech, and learning about the spectrum of jobs that exist across healthcare. "My app I choose is called the Magical Mangarrayi country, it's for back home. So when you go swimming in the tourist attraction places, there will be a little QR code that you can scan. And when you scan it it shows you the history of Mangarrayi country and all about Mataranka photos and fishing places and shops and yeah." She talks about her app design - from planning to detailing it out on the computer. It comes as Monash Health, Victoria's largest health service and Indigenous-owned and managed non-for-profit organisation, Deadly Coders are helping introduce First Nations students to career pathways in Science, Technology, Engineering or Maths. Dan Carter is the Chief Aboriginal Health Adviser at Monash Health. "This is really to expose Aboriginal and Torres Strait kids in school to STEM science, technology, engineering, math career pathways, and as a large health service that does have many STEM careers across engineering and other areas, we thought this was a really good fit for expanding on our Aboriginal workforce, that we have real targets in place to really try and recruit and engage with more." Monash Health also has a well-established program for the recruitment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nurses, midwives, and allied health workers. Mr Carter told SBS News how they have created an opportunity to help build the future workforce and broaden the roles filled by Indigenous Australians. "We have an Aboriginal employment plan at Monash Health that looks at the recruitment and retention of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander staff and career development as well. And so we do a pretty good job at the traditional career areas of medicine, doctors, nurses, and allied health. And we thought how do we expand upon that to engage in some of those careers in the STEM place across the spectrum of careers and health." They were approached by Deadly Coders to run a small mini hackathon event to engage local school kids in the area, as they invest resources into digital health. "Digital Health is really the information and communication structure systems that sit behind our health services that really support us to deliver or tackle health problems and then support us to deliver health solutions in, I guess, delivery of healthcare to improve health outcomes." Deadly Coders ran the App Prototyping Program at Melbourne's Moorabbin Hospital, with a focus on digital health. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare defines digital health as systems, tools and services based on information and communications technology that can be used to treat patients and collect and share a patient's health information. Andrew Brodie is the Co-Founder and General Manager Deadly Coders, that more broadly delivers STEM education. "That might be a face-to-face STEM program at a school for children in Year Two. And in that case, the programs would be designed to be gamified, hands on story based, pedagogically aligned to how indigenous kids learn best and they're really designed to get kids interested in something and bring down barriers." He says they move from there into more formal programs with high school students where they may be teaching text-based coding languages, problem solving with technology, building robots, or learning how to build a website. The Indigenous-run not-for-profit's aim is to build interest, excitement and curiosity in STEM through hands-on activities and gamified learning. "We also have an online learning platform, so that online learning platform has valuable content on there. Things like digital literacy, financial literacy, coding tutorials. That particular platform is I think the only platform. It's kind designed by indigenous educators and tech experts and specifically for indigenous students." He adds that if students can learn to link fundamental skills in A-I [[artificial intelligence]] with something in the real world, that's what they want to achieve by building that engagement amongst students. They also run the Deadly Coders Academy - a job skilling program designed to create alternative pathways into the tech sector through upskilling rather than formal qualifications. "The students essentially will have some time learning about a design thinking framework. So essentially at big businesses, how to tech groups within those big businesses work together to solve problems. Once the students have a bit of a grounding in that design thinking framework, they will then get access to and a bit of a 101 crash course in how to use an app prototyping software." He says at the end of the three days, the students in their group will get an opportunity to pitch what they've built back to Monash Health and he hopes a panel of people there will be able to decide which app solves the problem the best. Akeima is a 14-year-old from the Katherine community. In the three-days, she created a Mindset app for people struggling in school. "On the second day we wrote it down and we started planning it. And at the end of the day we brought out our computers and started making our account to put it in, and the third day we just finishing up our apps with classical coding." She says it was inspiring to hear from the speakers from Monash Health at the event. "It was kind of inspiring cause it made me thought probably in my course I would have helped out with hospitals or something like that. It was really good of hearing of how they were going with their life." Dan Carter says the students enjoy tackling digital solutions in a health setting. "The kids have just really just enjoyed engaging with a bit of a fun program to tackle digital solutions to digital problems in a health setting. So this has more been about engaging the students at a high school level." Deadly Coders have been around since mid 2023. Andrew Brodie says they are growing quickly and have space for up to 30 students in their program. "We always have some students that just take to technology like a duck to water, and it's really nice watching young people who just, something clicks for them and they get it and they get really interested in it, especially when there are kids who may not have seen technology as a pathway that was available to them. So we do get a lot of kids who didn't realise they were interested in technology, it clicks for them and they just love the program and get really interested after that." He says that's why they do what they do, with a goal to impact Indigenous students nationally.