Meet the founder

Hi, I'm Taleena.

How it started

I study Computer Science and Cybersecurity, and I have loved building technology since I was at school.

However the more time I spent behind a screen, the more I noticed how much I missed being outside. I grew up in regional Western Australia, surrounded by extraordinary nature without ever really knowing how to be part of it. Wildflowers would appear along roads I had driven a hundred times. Whales would pass the coast for weeks. Fungi would come up after rain and vanish before I thought to look.

Meanwhile the technology around me kept getting better at holding my attention.

This left me with a question I kept coming back to.

What if technology could bring us closer to the world outside instead of pulling us away from it?

What we're building

Syqei is what I wish had existed when I was in high school. It is a youth technology studio working at the intersection of creative technology, ecology and education. Young people take on applied projects shaped from ecological questions, environmental data and real-world field problems, then build something they can test, refine and show. They walk away with work they can point to and a genuine next step.

You do not have to arrive as an environmentalist to belong. Ecology is the context. The technology, problem-solving and creative practice are the way in.

Why Syqei

Syqei is pronounced psy-key.

The name comes from Psyche, an Ancient Greek word tied to both the soul and the butterfly. Butterflies have always stood for curiosity, change and transformation.

That is the whole idea. The person who starts a project unsure of themselves is rarely the same person who finishes it. A real project, a team and something you built can change how you see a place, and how you see yourself in it.

Making it happen

Alongside my studies, a lot of my energy goes into helping more young women and first in family students see a place for themselves in technology. I have mentored high school and primary school students across metro and regional WA, and interstate, and spoken on panels for events like International Women's Day about what a path into tech and science can actually look like.

It is the same thread that runs through Syqei. Helping young people see themselves as technologists, then giving them a real-world brief and the proof that they can build something meaningful.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement, the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest.

Sir David Attenborough