Host, Inventor, Writer, and CEO of Makotronics Enterprises Inc.
Book this speaker: Andini Makosinski
About This Speaker: Andini Makosinski
Andini Makosinski is a 2020’s multipotential, inventor, host, and in-demand speaker with many passions in the sciences and arts. Her first toy was a box of transistors, which kickstarted her curiosity into discovering how the world around her worked. Her mother, coming from a small village in the Philippines, and her father, growing up during WWII-torn Poland resulted in Andini’s childhood filled with the belief that being given less would result in maximizing one’s creativity. Andini was told to make her own toys with her hot glue gun, which she did by piecing together spare parts and garbage she collected around the house.
At age 11, Andini began entering science fairs with her inventions, and competed at 10 science fairs before graduating high school. Her projects were in the area of alternative energy harvesting. Andini’s most famous invention was born out of her friend Maria’s problem, who lived in the Philippines and had reached out to Andini in distress when she failed her grade in school. Maria was unable to study at night, as her family couldn’t afford electricity or light. Andini invented the Hollow Flashlight, a flashlight that runs off the heat of the human hand. A video of the Hollow Flashlight ended up going viral as 15 year-old Andini won her age category at the Google Science Fair, and she was soon invited to show her invention on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Her next invention that she shared with Jimmy (and the world) was the eDrink, a coffee mug that converts the excess heat of your hot drink into electricity, giving your phone or iPod a boost of energy, which also won multiple awards at the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair.
Since then, Andini has been named to both the Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 (Energy category) and Time Magazine 30 Under 30 World Changers lists. She was one of Glamour Magazine’s top ten College Women of the Year, one of seven of Teen Vogue Global Earth Angels, Popular Science’s “Breakout Young Inventor of the Year”, named on Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Young Millionaires” list, and has given 5 TEDx talks. Andini has appeared with Miley Cyrus for Converse, named the global brand ambassador for Uniqlo’s Heat-Tech fleece, and worked with Vice to create a campaign for the Google Pixel.
Andini has hosted multiple events in New York City and Singapore for the Greentech Festival, a green-energy conference created by F1 driver Nico Rosberg. She also has hosted on camera two seasons of her financial literacy show ‘Your World on Money’, made in conjunction with the Singleton Foundation and Freethink Media, and the series is sponsored by Experian. Andini is an Abundance 360 Scholar of Peter Diamandis’ program, an expedition member of Julia Middleton’s Women Emerging that seeks to find an approach to leading that resonates with women, and Andini recently graduated from UVic with a degree in English and Film Studies. Andini also studied acting for a year at Herbert Berghof Studios in New York City, while simultaneously designing on a line of children’s toys that ran off of green energy.
Andini is one of the campaign faces of Maybelline’s Green Edition makeup line, a major effort towards sustainable practices in the beauty space. She is currently writing her first book, focused on the 21st Century Multipotential individual, and it is set to be released by Knopf Canada in Spring 2025.
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The impact you have on your students doesn't necessarily depend on the space, tools and resources you have - it's HOW you use what you got. Just like a great artist never blames their tools, as an educator you must be open to improvising and innovating within whatever parameters/resources you are given. Andini believes that project based learning may be the key to what 21st Century Education looks and feels like.
Andini pulls from her unique childhood and competitive science fair experience and explores how you can create the appropriate environment for Project Based Learning, one that will foster a passion within your students to begin organically connecting with their innate creativity, critical thinking, and innovative skills for the rest of their lives. Andini always believes to lead with love, and it is a great gift to create a space where your students feel excited about what they're learning, and empowered enough that their voice and unique ideas have the ability - at any age - to make a positive difference in this world.
The future of education is one where teaching leans towards our students' individual passions and skills, allowing them the personalized freedom to also express what they've learned in a format they choose, instead of a more traditional assignment approach. We also need to encourage a flexible classroom space, where the teacher learns equally as much from the students, and free-flowing dialogue and debate is encouraged between them. Andini envisions a future where different subjects that were traditionally separated (eg. science and art), are instead mixed. Equally crucial is preparing students to intelligently interact with AI generated content and information, and to do this we need to begin teaching early on critical thinking and visual analysis skills.
Even though Gen Z'er Andini chose to grow up without a smartphone, she does believe that the use of technology as a tool in the classroom is possible - if done in a way that doesn’t encourage the students to use it as a crutch. In this talk, Andini discusses what she envisions the future of education to be like, and also touches on the importance of technical and manual skills still being taught, and the power of bringing techniques from her experience in improv and acting classes into the traditional classroom.
In this talk, Andini touches on the crucial yet often overlooked combination of science and art, and why we need to reconsider the way STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) is taught in school. She dives into history to show how scientists and artists have always organically worked together and needed each other, and questions why we have decided - especially in popular culture - to generate negative stereotypes of people in STEM versus people in the arts. Examples of Renaissance individuals in history are Leonardo da Vinci, Hedy Lamarrr, and even actress Jamie Lee Curtis has a patent for a new kind of diaper she invented! Anyone can love - and be good at - the sciences AND the arts. Andini believes in the power of combining one's own unique talents and interests in the sciences and arts to not only live a more fulfilling creative life, but also a more successful one.