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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Speaking Topics: Andini Makosinski

Combining Science and Art
Andini discusses the crucial yet often overlooked combination of science and art in the world around us. She encourages the audience to rethink the many stereotypes that the media has perpetuated over the years around people who pursue STEM versus Arts. Andini questions why we pit these fields against each other, instead of celebrating the many ways in which science and art are intrinsically linked. Andini believes that if we start showing the synergy between the arts and sciences at an earlier age in the educational system, it could cause a radical shift in society and cause a new generation of inventors and proactive problem-solvers to evolve.
Andini’s Life Story
One of her most requested talks, Andini focuses on her unique growing up experience - infused with classical opera, silent movies from the 1910’s, taking old electronics apart, inventing using garbage, eating insects, collecting bones, filming and editing with her dad on his documentary shoots, and beginning her science fair journey. Andini then explores the various international science fairs she competed in during her teenage years, and how her infamous inventions of the Hollow Flashlight and the eDrink came about while she was in high school.
Project-Based Learning
The standard classroom setup of a teacher lecturing in front of a room of unenthused students (who are already dreading that night's assigned textbook questions) should be illegal in the 21st century. This long-used method makes learning become a resented chore, instead of something to get excited about. How can we encourage and enable teachers around the world to bring their teaching methods up to date, thereby inspiring their students to become infinitely curious, life-long learners?


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
When we are very passionate about a subject, learning becomes easy, like a sponge soaking up water. When we are approached with a subject we find (initially) uninteresting and unrelatable, and then are being taught it in an unappealing manner, you might as well be pouring water onto a duck's back. All the information will roll right off - as parents like to often exclaim in frustration: "It's always in one ear and out the other!"


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.
STEAM Education
Andini enjoys living her life as a 2020’s Renaissance Woman, meaning from a young age she has always cultivated interests in both the sciences and arts, and chooses to pursue all her passions, instead of settling on one specific subject. She believes that interchanging professions - especially with the gig economy boom - will become a very normal way of life for the next generation of youth, and that we need to start shifting the educational space to compensate for students' many different interests and skills. This also leads again to a passion and project based learning, which through Andini's experience, she considers to be the best way for students to become most enthusiastic about their school experience.


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.
Communicating Your Ideas
Having strong communication and storytelling skills are more vital than ever, especially with the advent of A.I. and social media. Now there are billions of voices (some human, some not!) on the Internet, so how can you ensure your ideas stand out and be heard? Andini reflects on her own 10 year journey as a public speaker and presenter - as well as an inventor/entrepreneur pitching her ideas - and gives advice on how to strengthen this skill in the audience’s own lives.
Tech - Tool or Terror?
Andini is a Gen Z’er who grew up with a smartphone, and then chose to own a flip phone when she first left for college. While she now struggles like the rest of us with her relationship to social media and her smartphone, Andini believes we all need to rethink our relationship with technology. As more new tech gets thrown at us on a daily basis, it becomes hard to draw the line. What to adopt, what to learn, what to ignore? How can AI be used in our personal and professional lives as a tool to make things easier, versus a crutch that weakens our creativity and imagination?
Social Media and Teens
Andini talks about what it could look like for youth (and/or you!) to have healthy interactions on social media - and if it’s even possible. She references the latest developments in both the mental health and social media spaces.
The Inventing Mindset
Andini’s first book, releasing Spring 2025 with Knopf Canada, discusses the idea of inhabiting what she likes to call ‘the Inventing Mindset’, a unique problem-solving approach to life that encourages constant creativity.
Give Your Kid Garbage
… And as an adult - you should play with garbage around the house too! With everyone's eye towards sustainability, Andini firmly believes in innovating from whatever you do have. When you have less distractions, it allows your mind to experience boredom - and daydreaming, where some of the best ideas are born.
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