About
Questionable Research Labs (QRL) is a Whangārei-based charitable trust providing a purposeful and challenging environment for curious young minds. Founded in 2015 as a local coding club, we have grown into a vibrant community hub where young people play with all things related to Science, Design, and Engineering.
Currently the Labs run out of “The Woodshed” 44A Riverside Drive in the Whangarei Town Basin.
In the Labs, we PLAY with all things related to Science, Design and Engineering.
Our Goal
To provide a purposeful environment to expand and challenge the world of curious people. A space for the geek, creator and idea breaker in us all.
At Questionable Research Labs we
- Love to play with ideas and try things out.
- Are ok with not knowing what we are doing.
- Leave plenty of room for disaster.
- Don’t focus on learning, it just happens when we play.
- We see technology as the intersection of Science, Design and Engineering. We PLAY in this broad fun space and indiscriminately love it all.
Our teens routinely head down to Auckland to participate in technology events aimed at university students and professionals. For one of those events they created a Virtual Reality horror game with haptic feedback via muscle stimulating electrodes. In another they created ‘Zap Chess’ - a chess game with movable magnetised squares that zap the players if they don’t move their chess pieces quick enough. They have also taken part in international competitions like GovHack, a large Australian/ NZ competition, to build apps that use open government data for social good. In 2022 the teens won an international award for their project.
The Labs are free to attend, as we want to make the space accessible to anyone. The Labs are fully volunteer-run by members of the community, and our volunteers have put in roughly 3,400 volunteer hours in 2021. The Labs are self-funded, mostly by parents through a patronage model with equipment donated by the community.
Links to more information about Questionable Research Labs:
- The Labs in A Nutshell - YouTube Video. Written, filmed, directed and edited by the teens - YouTube.
- Talk to the Whangarei District Council meeting (Dec 2021). You can skip the first 4 minutes - YouTube.
- A Advocate Article (2022) - NZ Herald.
- A video about the Kiwijam game development competition at Auckland University that shows some of our youth (2021) - YouTube.
- Auckland Uni Article that mentions our Whangarei youth (2020) - University of Auckland CIE Newsroom
- A video showing one of our youth teams projects at the “Terrible Ideas” hackathon (2021) and the finished terrible game - YouTube | YouTube (Terrible game).
- News article which covers a reporter’s perspective (2021) TheBit
- A COVID data science project by our teens (2021) TheBit