Students come up with incredible Star Wars-inspired device to track lost toddlers

Inspired by Star Wars, four ingenious primary school students have come up with an award-winning device that can help parents locate their lost toddlers.

Manly Village students have come up with an invention that is a tracking device to find toddlers. James Renton-Schmidt 9, Archie Partington 11, Tal Carmel 10 and Olivia Renton-Schmidt 11 plus toddler with tracking hat is Bertie Partington 4.

FOUR ingenious Manly Village school students have come up with an award-winning device that can help parents locate their lost toddlers – even if they have ended up in a galaxy far, far away.

Manly Village students have come up with an invention that is a tracking device to find toddlers. Toddler Bertie Partington 4, Olivia Renton-Schmidt 11 , James Renton-Schmidt 9, Tal Carmel 10 and Archie Partington 11.

This month, Tal Carmel, Archie Partington, Olivia Renton-Schmidt and her brother James claimed third place at a national technology competition with their tracking device.

They designed and built a Star Wars-inspired hat for toddlers that included a GPS tracker.

Despite all going to the same school, the students, aged from 9 to 11, were representing after-school program TechScience Australia at the Young ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Explorers competition.

Olivia, 11, came up with the idea after a friend went missing – but was fortunately found safe – at a large public event a few years ago.

“At the Manly Food and Wine Festival we had a friend who got lost and we had to call the police,” she said.

Manly Village students have come up with an invention that is a tracking device to find toddlers. Archie Partington 11, James Renton-Schmidt 9, Tal Carmel 10 and Olivia Renton-Schmidt 11 plus toddler with tracking hat is Bertie Partington 4.

“We thought of this idea because it could help prevent that from happening in the future.”

The two-part device includes a carry bag and a hat concealing the tracker.

The bag, intended for the parents, includes a minicomputer that is connected wirelessly to a GPS tracker in the hat.

When the child wearing the hat gets about 30m away from their parents the hat – which has a design based on Star Wars character BB-8 – starts glowing red and a buzzer goes off.

The hat flashes orange and green at shorter distances, too.

The same colour system is built into the bag’s technology.

“It’s got lots of different components on it to help it work,” Archie, 11, said. “It uses the same coding (linking the two items).

“It uses latitude and longitude and all those kind of things to track each other, calculate the distance and changes the colour.”

TechScience Australia owner Amnon Carmel helped guide the children — but he said the project was virtually all of their doing.

“They did all of the designing,” he said.

“Building, coding, connecting, soldering, testing ... there was a lot of work.”

A lot of thought also went into ensuring the design was something the toddlers would want to wear.

Asked why they chose a Star Wars character to base their design on, Archie said: “Because most people like Star Wars and most people like BB-8.”

For more on TechScience go to techscience.com.au.

See a video of the technology at facebook.com/manly daily.