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A South Auckland school is punching way above its weight at technology awards. Rowena Orejana talks to some of our brightest minds.

Mitchell Clark lopes down the footpath between the reception office at Manurewa High School and the science lab where his mates wait.

The young people in their green school jerseys look like any other teenagers, until they speak.

Then, one realises, these kids are far from ordinary.

Mitchell's team, Ctrl+Alt+M, is the overall winner in the Auckland version of the Otago Technology Innovation Challenge. Claire Taia and Amy van de Wegare make up the rest of the team.

They came up with a concept that will restore mobility to people whose nerve function is impaired.

"It's a sleeve made of plastic. Embedded in it is a single layer of carbon atoms which is highly conductive to electricity. Also embedded within is a micro-controller, one of the technologies that were presented. That was designed to intercept signals from the brain that will decode it," says Mitchell, a Year 13 student.

"We were given the technologies and given ideas what field they could be applied to," adds Claire.

The competition is run annually by the University of Otago's Department of Information Science.

"It aims to introduce teams of Year 12 and 13 students to emerging technologies being researched in the information science department," says organiser, Dr Melanie Middlemiss.

"Teams are challenged to identify a problem that could be solved, or business concept that could be developed around the use of these technologies."

The competition was founded in 2007 in Dunedin then expanded to Wellington. Auckland's version began last year.

Another Manurewa High team, the Yellow Dragons, won Best Understanding of the Technology award. OPDynamics, the idea presented by Aaron Coulton, David Le and Richard Hooper, aims to change and improve the development process of online games.

"It's for independent game developers. It costs a lot of money to make good games. We want to keep the cost down so more innovative ideas can come out," says Richard.

It took them 10 minutes to come up with the idea. "I thought we had a good chance [of winning]," says David.

The problem was how to condense their presentation into three minutes.

"We had so much information. It was probably what gave us the Best Understanding award," says Aaron.

In his blog, Paul Matthews, chief executive officer of the NZ Computer Society and a competition judge, says he was genuinely blown away by the presentations.

"If this event was a representation of the quality of the intake into Otago's Info Science degree, I have to say the future of our sector is looking very bright indeed."

Richly deserved

Other winners are
Best Presentation: The Senior Citizens (ACG Senior College), concept by Park iT.
Audience Choice Award: ACG Strathallan (ACG Strathallan), concept by StrathTech.