Gold and silver wins from China meet bronze and honours from Tunisia. These young South Africans from across the country have been busy wowing the science world. The kids aren’t just alright, they’re shooting the lights out!
Global (09 April 2025) — Several young South African learners from across the country represented their home as champions recently, wowing the science world in the process.
With major STEM events happening across the globe in recent times, it was in China and Tunisia that South African science projects made people say, ‘These kids are onto something’.
Beijing, China
In China, at the Beijing Youth Science Creation Competition, matrics Adam Gibbon and Christopher Collier-Reed had people thinking about food waste in a whole new way.
The Pinelands High pair came up with a clever project dubbed ‘Flies to the Rescue: Innovating Food Waste Management Using Black Soldier Fly Larvae’. Yes, fly larvae.
In short, their project looked at how the larvae could help organic waste decompose. But the real kicker was that while the waste decomposed, it was also able to leave behind valuable bi-products—creating an eco-positive return on organic waste.
In Beijing, the duo ended up winning the First Prize (or what we’d consider gold in South Africa) at the competition—one that’s notorious for uniting the brightest young minds in the world.
But Adam and Christopher weren’t alone in their Beijing Victory. Cady De Koker, a Grade 11 at Northern Cape High School, also shot the lights out; earning a second-place ‘silver’ for a project that’ll make you wonder what these kids are eating for breakfast (and where we can get some of it too).
Cady’s science project is called “A Mathematician’s Guide to Neuroscience: Classifying and Diagnosing Brain Tumours Using Fractal-Analysis Morphometrics”. Needless to say, the brain-rot bug doesn’t know Cady.
And if that wasn’t enough, Samiya Waza, a matric from Umtata High School, also claimed Second Prize for her project ‘Med—Net: A Comprehensive and Robust Information Management System for Healthcare Facilities.” Future Minister of Health? We certainly see it.
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Mahdia, Tunisia
Meanwhile, in Tunisia, St Dominics Newcastle School Grade 12s Hamzah Ismail and Vibhav Ramdas earned bronze and Honourable Award at I-FEST² ( International Festival of Engineering, Science and Technology).
Hamzah bagged the bronze for his project ‘Developing eco-friendly, fire-retardant plastic bricks as an alternative in modern construction’, while Vibhav earned his Honourable Award for the project ‘Using object detection to improve road maintenance’.
All of these young minds are South African, and all have come up with ideas that our country sorely needs across a spectrum of departments.
To this point, we’re not just impressed by the teenagers, we’re inspired and hopeful because of them.
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