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 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 outsourced development of the platform.

The STAR portal went live late in June 2017. COSMOS magazine published the story and so did the Chief Scientist of Australia (webpage still live at 9 July 2026). 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”.

Engineers Australia has advised: “The site was built by developers National Girls Collaborative in the US and an agreement was entered into for annual licence fee to support the site. The site was available for any STEM program delivery body to upload their activity and for students, teachers and general public to search and find STEM activities. The activity was reviewed by National Girls Collaborative to make sure it was a STEM activity. …The site maintained activity over time but did not grow or gain traction as expected.”

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 the Queensland curriculum. The Society resolved to develop the Queensland Science Network as a Queensland-focused platform for access to snippets of general science, with educational materials being a particular example. 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. But that niche remains, such as 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 STAR Portal: 933 activities from 294 providers, attracting 121,696 page views. As the years rolled on clearly there was concern that the scope had drifted away from the natural business of EA and also concern about quality control of some of the entries (the latter being a concern shared by QSN). EA has advised:

“A 2024 Engineers Australia review of the site showed limited references to ‘engineering’ and outdated information. Technical issues started to be raised in 2021 due to the ageing 2017 code and platform. Site security concerns were also raised and funding was not available to address the technical and security concerns.” EA ceased its support for the site in 2024.

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 in pdf format. In the meantime it has secured the web domain www.starportal.org.au.

The US-based WaybackMachine (www.archive.org) captured the website 163 times between 25 August 2017 and 5 March 2025 (https://web.archive.org/web/20250305215916/https://starportal.edu.au/ ). So long as the WaybackMachine remains functional, the database can be interrogated and is accessible to Australians. However, the security of the WaybackMachine itself is understood to be fragile because of severe cuts to scientific institutions in the United States.

Leaders of former STARportal projects note:
In the meantime, the Office of the Chief Scientist Queensland (OCSQ) 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.

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