Following a brainstorming session held in July 2015 (see the website of The Royal Society of Queensland for details), the Society advocated for the development of a web portal to offer access to a range of authoritative materials and programs in science education in Queensland. This portal was to be differentiated from a plain Internet search engine or the national educators’ site Scootle in that the materials would be arranged within a coherent pedagogical framework and checked for consistency with the national and Queensland curricula. The Office of the Chief Scientist of Queensland endorsed the project and was in the process of securing funding but the Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia saw the benefit of creating such a portal with a national scope, and it took over development. The Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia outsourced the development to Engineers Australia which contracted the Zoo Group to design the platform. The STAR portal went live late in June 2017. COSMOS magazine published the story. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority described the portal as “Australia’s national portal for exciting and engaging STEM activities from around the country. This searchable database connects parents, students and teachers with their local and online STEM activities in real time”.
The leaders of The Royal Society of Queensland at the time felt that the platform, being national and also promoting commercial materials, was not quite what they had in mind; that there was still a need for a platform that Queensland teachers could trawl to find materials specifically relevant to their locality and their curriculum. The Society resolved to develop the Queensland Science Network as a Queensland-focused platform for educational materials. It has had the support of Education Queensland and the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority in this mission. However, the Society has been unable to secure funding to achieve QSN’s educational potential. The establishment of the Office of the Chief Scientist of Queensland’s excellent repository (see invitation below) narrows the niche that QSN could fill, such as by calling up datasets and project materials from its member bodies.
The Annual Report of Engineers Australia for 2018-2019 includes statistics on the popularity of the portal: 933 activities from 294 providers, attracting 121,696 page views.
In mid-2025, the holder of the domain www.starportal.edu.au allowed the domain to lapse, which explains why the URL is now dead. This loss highlights the importance of civic organisations like The Royal Society of Queensland and the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland with long lifetimes (in those cases, crossing the boundaries of three centuries). QSN will endeavour to recover the materials on the site.
Leaders of former STARportal projects note:
In the meantime, the Office of the Chief Scientist Queensland has asked QSN to invite any leader of a project that was previously showcased on the STARportal to instead submit it to OCSQ’s Queensland-focused library of educational materials.