yia! Awards Night 2022
Cucumber has been a partner of the Young Innovator Awards for a decade and 2022’s edition of the awards came to a conclusion on Thursday 1 October at Classic Flyers Museum with the yia! Awards Ceremony.
Karl Stevenson was the MC for the awards night and it kicked off with an amusing interaction between Karl and an Artificial Intelligence being called Aria. The judges called it a draw on the night!
All Photos: Salina Galvan Photography
There were brief talks from last year’s Senior Supreme Winner Michael Ren and Jeannine Walsh, Head of New Ventures at BECA. Michael had a 2 day internship with Cucumber earlier in the year (read about it here) and has been a regular visitor to our office all year, discussing technical topics with our development team.
People’s Choice Awards
25 yia! pre-judges from local businesses assessed a few hundred entries from over 600 students and the finalists were announced a few weeks before the awards night. There was an online People’s Choice vote for each age range category and 1,500 people watched the submission videos of the finalists and cast their votes.
The People’s Choice Awards were presented to the teams that secured most online votes in each age category. Click on each image below for all the details of each innovation
Category Awards
Submissions for yia! require work in the areas of research of an innovation and analysis of how sustainable it is. Finally communication skills are required to present the innovation in pdf format and in a short video.
Awards were presented to the team that did the best work in each of these areas :-
Research: Fern Airways
Sustainability: MITS – Māra In The Sky
Communication: Oshu
Supreme Awards
The finalists were assessed by the judges and ranked for their innovation. After some robust discussions, the top 3 for each age range were decided.
Intermediate
The GFE
Macron Me
Meet.A.Friend
Junior
H2OK
SOUL
Produce ZOOM
Senior
MaiBand
Ecolocators
Real Meals
The winners receive a cash prize as well as a short internship early in 2023. The internship is held at companies such as Beca, Bluelab, Woods Agency and Cucumber with the companies chosen that best match the innovation.
Cucumber offers internships to winners who have a digital technology element to their innovation and it is always an enjoyable experience to host these young people and their ideas.
