Team WiFire lights up the stage at our fourth Ideas Challenge Pitch Night💡🔥🛜🚨

On Thursday 28 May, we hosted our fourth Ideas Challenge Pitch Night at the Macquarie University Incubator. It was a spectacular celebration of student creativity, agency and storytelling. We had 10 finalist teams, representing 8 schools, who had successfully completed the reformatted two-term Ideas Challenge during Semester 1, 2026 and been selected by a panel to pitch in front of a supportive audience made up of parents, teachers, school executives and supporters.

They competed for $1,000 in cash prizes on the night and all benefited from valuable real-world feedback. It was also fantastic to see other teams from cohort 4 in the audience, who were there to cheer on their peers and celebrate their own hard work during this fun yet rigorous extracurricular program. Keep scrolling to see all the prize winners and finalists who joined WiFire at the big pitch night...👇

The Semester 1 Ideas Challenge was a free, two-term online skills-building program for emerging innovators and entrepreneurs from Years 9-12. It involved three extension tasks, which were assessed and each resulted in a microcredential if passed. With the addition of a fourth certificate for pitch night teams, 210 individual microcredentials were unlocked by our hard-working student cohort this semester!

Big shout-outs must also go out to our student emcees, team Redume, for their excellent MC work that created a warm and welcoming vibe with the right mix of humour, empathy (having been prior finalists themselves!) and professionalism to keep the night running smoothly! Another big thank you to our esteemed judging panel made up of Macquarie University and MQ Incubator luminaries: James Linton - Manager at MQ Incubator, Vicky Tzioumis - Project Officer at MQ Access & Widening Participation, and Georgia Muriti - Senior Educator at Young Wisdom and MQ Incubator-resident founder with her own startup, Welv. It wasn't an easy job for them!

The event video is coming soon! Subscribe to Young Wisdom on YouTube to be notified when it goes live:

Now, let's introduce you to the finalists!

• Astra: Helping students recognise stress early through a wearable burnout tracker and wellbeing app designed for low-effort mental health support.
• Autobin: Autobin bridges the gap between disposal and recycling through automatic waste sorting, encouraging sustainable habits with innovation, adaptation, and inspiration.
• CompanionCare: No elderly person should ever be left feeling like a burden because they need a little extra care.
• Credikid: Helping kids find less bore in their chores, earn credits, and take charge of their rewards, all stress-free.
• Infinitus: Building a more sustainable future with small-scale hydro systems designed to cut energy costs and improve accessibility of small-scale renewable energy.
• Next Level Learning: Teaching real-world skills schools overlook through gamified, interactive learning designed to rebuild focus and engagement.
• Plush Pack: Sending emergency aid and joy to children, one pack at a time.
• SimVita: Transforming workplace safety training through AI-powered immersive simulations that prepare workers in high-risk industries.
• Ventra: An app designed to help teach teens entrepreneurship in a fun, engaging and sustainable way. We strive to make entrepreneurship education available and fun for all teens. 
•  WiFire: Using existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to create smart fire warning systems that detect danger earlier, farther and beyond the limits of conventional alarms.

Here's a bit more of a look at the composition of the finalist teams:

And just a reminder about how the broader cohort looked:

And now... 🥁our prize winners!

Huge congratulations to our prize winners, finalists and all program participants for such an awesome effort throughout Semester 1 in the Ideas Challenge!

The Ideas Challenge will be back in Semester 2, 2026 and applications are open now for any students in Years 9-12 until 8pm on Friday 4 September.

If you're thinking about it, we'd strongly suggest putting an application together and giving it a go! Here are some recent testimonials from this cohort: 

The Ideas Challenge is a great opportunity for high school students to gain entrepreneurial experience, and I found it was a great introduction for me into the business world.

I really enjoyed the Ideas Challenge because it helped our team recognise the weaknesses and strengths of our idea, and how we could further develop it. I really enjoyed the meetings that provided helpful tips and feedback, which definitely helped us achieve our goal of a practical solution!

This program was such an amazing and educational experience to meet new people, share ideas and grow my business.

If you're an educator and would like us to speak at an assembly or year group meeting about this fully-funded but increasingly competitive opportunity, just let us know!

Here is the application link for any interested students and teachers to share (applications are now open).

About the Secondary Schools Program  

Macquarie University Incubator and Young Wisdom teamed up in late 2023 to create a range of entrepreneurial skills-building opportunities for young innovators and their supporters. To date, we've worked with over 10,100 students and more than 90 different schools across NSW.

Macquarie University Incubator is a leading community of innovators being supported with facilities, mentorship, events and programming designed to help them launch and scale their groundbreaking ventures globally.

Young Wisdom is a Sydney-based social enterprise offering entrepreneurial upskilling opportunities and support services on a mission to help young founders launch and grow their new ventures with confidence.

Any interested teachers, parents and students can subscribe to receive our email updates to make sure you get all the latest info straight to your inbox!

See you next time✌️

From Shahe and the Ideas Challenge team