A group of students from our Eco and Tech Teams recently had the honour (and excitement) of travelling to Singapore to present their newly developed app, EcoMe, to hundreds of people at EduTech Asia!
This amazing opportunity – which showed true resilience, global-mindedness, communication and collaboration in our students – came after months of hard work and dedication between the two teams to provide a tech solution to an eco issue they’d identified within Rugby School Thailand. We caught up with some of the students to find out all about it!
What was the problem?
The problem was that teachers were not recycling materials. They’d get deliveries from online shopping and have nowhere to reuse these materials, so just ended up throwing things away. When doing projects they would buy new items and then throw them away after.
What was the solution?
As a solution, we made the Eco Room! The Eco Room has been in this school for 5 years now and has solved our problem by letting teachers, students, and staff donate any clean recyclable materials to our room. Teachers could also order the recycled materials from us. They used to order via email, but that caused many problems. Sometimes the teacher wouldn’t give all of the information needed, for example, the date they want it delivered by. We decided that we needed to do something to make this process even more smooth. So…
We developed an app!
The Eco Team and Tech Tech Team joined forces to design an App, which we’ve called ‘EcoMe’. EcoMe is an App for requesting materials from the Eco Room, replacing emails, adding efficiency and streamlining our service! It’s more efficient, quick, and best of all, it sends an automatic email straight to us with all the specific order details. EcoMe has a whole page dedicated to our inventory, a page for updates, a ‘box’ to put items in and many more. There’s even a section for you to put all the information needed for us to succeed in the delivery.
What did we do at EduTech Asia?
We had the opportunity to present our idea on stage to a group of well-known Edu Tech judges from around the world. There were also hundreds of people watching us present on stage! We then spent our days at our booth, speaking to members of the conference (there were up to 8000 people there!) about our project. We encouraged other school leaders to build their own recycling rooms and received lots of keen interest in purchasing our App to use for their schools once it’s ready. We were the youngest team, competing against Sixth Form students mostly. Although we didn’t win, we are incredibly proud of our efforts and most of all, excited to have motivated other schools to join in on what we are doing! Our next goal is to get all international schools in Thailand on board with our idea and to get them using our App soon, too. Stay tuned for exciting updates.
Students Reflecting on the EduTech Asia experience…
EduTech Asia 2024 was one great big experience for all of us. We met a lot of nice people and made friends who helped encourage and support us. It was a new experience for all of us and we were asked many questions and we were pretty nervous since we were going against older and more mature kids. We got to represent the school and help the world, but also got to have fun and enjoy ourselves as a team!
Miss Arnold reflecting on the project…
“The students were incredible throughout this entire process. Demonstrating plenty of resilience as well as a remarkable work ethic. They did all the work for this project during their break times, evenings after school, weekends and holidays. Their passion for both technology and the environment integrated brilliantly and I couldn’t be more proud of them. It’s been an honour to work with such talented students and I can’t wait to see where they go in the future! It also wouldn’t have been possible without the support from their parents, from travelling all the way to Singapore, to making our team shirts, to helping decorate our booth – it was just awesome to feel the support”.
