Theme: Why...?

On November 20, 2010 – Universal Children’s Day – the first TEDx Youth event is scheduled to take place.

TEDxYouth@CityofLight will be held at Shenton College, Perth, Western Australia.

Perth was famously dubbed City of Light when in 1962 city residents lit their house lights and streetlights as American astronaut John Glenn passed overhead while orbiting the earth on Friendship 7. The city repeated the gesture in 1998 as Glenn passed overhead on the Space Shuttle. The event will be hosted by Kieran Jiwa, and will run from 9am until 1pm.

Shenton College
Perth, 6008
Australia

Phill Nosworthy

Phill Nosworthy is the team leading facilitator of Beyond Chalk and a senior manager with Change|Labs who specialises in accelerated trust, platform rapport building, gestural languaging and personal influence. Phill has worked with leading brands including Napoleon Perdis, Apple and Giorgio Armani. As the Program Director for the Apple partnered program Beyond Chalk, Phill has personally worked with over 30 000 teachers to flip their thinking in the area of technology and its role in education. He is the author of the forthcoming books ‘Infectious You’ and ‘Kings Talk to Kings’. In partnership with a leading technology company, Change|Labs created Beyond Chalk. This national program inspires teachers, removes fear and professionally develops educators. Beyond Chalk has worked with more than 50,000 teachers to inspire and educate them about the future of technology in the classroom and pave the way for the next generation of digital learners.

Chantelle Baxter

Chantelle Baxter is passionate about making a difference in this world, particularly for girls in Africa. As the Co-Founder of the non-profit organisation Project Eight. Chantelle and the Project Eight team focus on providing educational opportunities for girls and young women in Sierra Leone. She is also a student in Melbourne’s School for Social Entrepreneurs and has been selected as one of Australia’s “Brightest Young Minds”. After a ‘taboo’ conversation about menstruation with a young girl in Africa, Chantelle launched an initiative to create a social enterprise that provides low cost sanitary pads for girls and women in developing countries.

Lachlan Binjalli Frank Cooke

Lachlan founded the ICEA Foundation in 2006, A youth run organisation with the goal of providing Aboriginal children in remote communities in Western Australia with opportunities to enhance their educational experience. ICEA also strives to promote understanding of Aboriginal culture and communities whilst highlighting issues faced by Aboriginal young people today to future leaders. In 2010, he won the Pride of Australia award and the Young Volunteer of the Year award for Mosman Park. Binjalli is the name given to him by the Aboriginal Bardi elders in the Kimberley as a sign of respect for the work he has done in their community.

Gary Cass

Gary Cass has been a key scientific collaborator with numerous art and science projects based at the University of Western Australia. Contributing a vast range of skills in agricultural and biological sciences to ongoing research projects, Cass has also coordinated and run Biotech Art Workshops at festivals and universities across Australia; Kings College London; and the University of California, Irvine. Cass is a founding member of Bioalloy, an ongoing research endeavor into artistic and scientific cyborgian systems developed at the University of Western Australia, beginning with the idea of designing and creating a machine that incorporates a living system that grows and nurtures its own ‘skin’.

Megan Goldspink

Megan Goldspink is a young science enthusiast who loves sharing her passion for science with the world. She has travelled the length and breadth of Australia and Scotland performing science shows and workshops. Megan has performed in tin sheds, classrooms, on remote islands and in art galleries form the Torres Strait to Timboon. She plays with fire, liquid nitrogen, robots, slime and bubbles on a regular basis and gets paid for it. Megan is currently managing the Science After School program at Scitech.

Jesse Phillips

Jesse started paddling when he was selected into the 1999 WAIS Talent Search Kayak Programme. Jesse had to sacrifice playing hockey and football to excel in kayaking, which early on paid off when he was crowned the 2000 Australian Marathon Champion in K1 and K2 (Under 14). Jesse had his sights set on representing Australia and went over to Japan in 2003 at the ICF Junior World Championships when he made both A Finals – 5th in K4 500m and 9th in K2 1000m. He has since paddled at World Cup 3 in China in 2006, toured Germany and Poland at two U23 International Regattas and in 2008 toured Europe competing in two World Cups and the International Sella Descent in Spain finishing 10th. Jesse was selected in the 2009 Senior Australian Kayak Team and will compete in two World Cups in Czech Republic and Hungary before returning home to prepare for the World Championships in Canada in August. Jesse has also been heavily involved in Theatre and Film around Perth for the past 6 years, where he has lead in local plays, musicals, films and TV commercials.

Heathcote Blue

Heathcote Blue plays easy breezy folk tunes for lazy Sunday afternoons and rainy days, open fires, cups of tea and old-smelling novels. Fingerpicking, wordsmithing and boot-stomping, it’s the nostalgic and familiar through a twenty-first century lens; recalling both indie folk of today and timeless sounds of yesteryears.

Mark Lloyd

With his inspiration coming from hip hop styles and the people he sees around him, a local rhymer has earned some fresh accolades. Moving to Perth from Albany as a two-year-old, Mark Lloyd has made the WA capital his home. While here, he’s discovered hip hop and a passion for telling stories through the medium that other artists might shy away from. Stripping that approach back to a spoken word offering earned Lloyd the winner’s tag at the second WA heat of Poetry Slam 2008. For a young man, the topic of female body image was a brave one but one that he tackled with conviction and a whole lot of heart. That mix of ability and nerve saw him named as winner of the WA final, earning himself a trip to the Sydney Opera House for the national final on Thursday 4 December.

Frances Harvey

Born into a family of scientists Frances Harvey won the state BioGeneius Challenge for her research project on spiders, and was flown to Chicago to compete against other international finalists. At the age of 15 Frances is already performing DNA sequencing and identifying new species!

Dominique Blanke

Dominique Blanke is a fifteen year-old student at Shenton College.