Saint John’s Brilliant Labs Turns Ripple Of Youth Innovation Into A Wave
SAINT JOHN — Brilliant Labs has been recognized for its work preparing Atlantic Canada’s youth for the digital age ahead, snagging the Innovation Champion award at InnovateNB Awards.
“It’s a tremendous privilege to be amongst so many innovative people,” said executive director Jeff Willson during the Brilliant Labs acceptance speech at the awards ceremony on Tuesday night.
“Years ago, at the KIRA Awards in Fredericton, we dropped a pebble and it started making a ripple across the province, through the Bay of Fundy, and eventually it made a wave reaching all of Atlantic Canada. “
“We’ve reached 95 percent of schools across the region but we can’t pat ourselves on the back because there’s that one teacher in one classroom, maybe two, but there are many more classrooms down so many other hallways that we need to also reach. “
Brilliant Labs is a Saint John-based charity that works with young people to foster digital skills through experience-based learning. Its projects aim to address United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and students are encouraged to think with a “socially responsible entrepreneurial spirit.”
The ultimate goal is to help Atlantic Canada transition from a natural resources-based economy to a sustainable knowledge-based economy.
The charity has provided more than 800,000 hands-on learning experiences for youth and has facilitated events like coding workshops, youth makerspaces, and student-led projects. The program has attracted talent from Tufts University, MIT, as well as engineers from around the world to “come to Atlantic Canada to inspire the next generation of innovators.”
In October, Brilliant Labs students brought its functional R2D2 robot, from the Star Wars series, to Hal-Con 2022. In February, the organization was one of 29 groups sharing an $80-million investment to help youth across Canada learn coding and digital skills.
With eight years of workshops and hands-on learning experiences under its belt, Brilliant Labs is also beginning to bear fruit in terms of creating new technologies that help its mission, like its “internet of things” platform and the b.Board open source electronics hardware prototyping platform.
Willson was accompanied at the awards ceremony by two high school students who were working on robots and had showcased them earlier at the Innovation Trade Show and Recruitment Showcase. One of the students had made a life-sized humanoid robot that uses artificial intelligence, while the other had created a rover using voice recognition.
While Willson called for a round of applause for the students, he also issued a call to action to the members of the audience.
“There’s so many people waiting for our help, we’re booking months in advance,” he said. “We have to transform everything system-wide” to address the challenges of the future like climate change. And that will require innovation starting in the classroom.
Speaking earlier in the day at the trade show and recruitment fair, innovation engineer Josh Keys demonstrated a machine that can detect different coloured objects and create a different output based on what’s detected. In this case, a sensor would determine the colour and pattern on six bands of LED lights.
“There’s a colour sensor on there, so using our interface here they can go in and program different responses using simple block codes, it’s like connecting puzzle pieces together” he explained.
“We’ve had teachers do this when they’re talking about light units in class,” he said. “They start talking about ‘what is light made up of’ ‘what are colours made up of?’ ‘what does it mean?’”.
“We start to do little games,” he said. “The teacher will put up a colour on one strip, and the students all quickly code their own strip. There’ll be a little contest to see who can actually break down the colour to red, green, and blue to get the closest approximation to what they see.”
“When they do it in that way, they really learn. It’s something that sticks with them.”
Creating lessons that make an impact is what Brilliant Labs is all about.
“We’re trying to equip our students for the future, for what’s going to be out there. The traditional jobs of today aren’t going to always exist. Working towards automation and coding, a lot of these things we need to make sure we equip our students for today, for the future,” Keys said.
At the end of his acceptance speech, Willson reflected on what’s been accomplished so far, and what is yet to come for Brilliant Labs and experiential learning in the digital age.
“Dropping that pebble nine years ago and allowing us to reach youth and support teachers. It’s a wonderful thing but it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he noted. “Where are we going to be in the next 8 years? We have to do this for our youth. “
“Education is probably the best return on investment we can get. “
Editor’s note: this story was last updated on November 28, at 10:58 am.
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].