School News

BSC Open Day

Blaze Aid Fundraiser

On Friday the 28th of February, the Middle Years Community Engagement class held a fundraiser during lunch time to raise money for Blaze Aid. The event included a sausage sizzle and a fun water fight, which encouraged lots of students to come along, get involved and support a great cause.

As a class, supporting Blaze Aid was especially important to us, as some of our students were personally affected by the Skipton and Carranballac fires. Seeing how these fires impacted people in our own community made us want to help others who are going through similar situations. Blaze Aid is an organisation that supports rural communities after natural disasters such as bushfires, by bringing volunteers together to rebuild and repair property damage like farm fencing.

During the fundraiser, students enjoyed the activities while contributing to a meaningful cause. In total, we raised $502. This money will assist Blaze Aid to continue their important work and support communities that are recovering from fires.

We would like to thank local businesses, Beaufort IGA, and the Beaufort Butcher for donating food for the sausage sizzle. We would also like to thank the students involved and the teachers who helped on the day. Overall, the fundraiser was a great success and showed how our school community can come together to help others.

Mathematics in Term 1 – Why Algebra Matters

During Term 1, students in Years 7–10 at Beaufort Secondary College have been focusing on Number and Algebra, learning how to work with patterns, variables and equations to solve problems. These ideas may seem abstract at first, but they form the foundation for many areas of mathematics students’ study later, including functions, statistics, financial mathematics and coding.

Did you know?

• The word algebra comes from the Arabic word al-jabr, from a book written around 820 AD by the mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

• The word algorithm, widely used in computing and artificial intelligence, comes from the Latin version of Al-Khwarizmi’s name.

• Algebra has been used for nearly 4,000 years, with early forms developed by Babylonian mathematicians to solve problems involving land measurement and trade.

• The letter x became commonly used to represent an unknown number in the 1600s thanks to the work of René Descartes.

• Algebra helped engineers calculate trajectories and fuel requirements during the Apollo 11 Moon Landing in 1969.

• Modern technologies such as search engines like Google rely on algebraic models to organise and rank billions of webpages.

Algebra is sometimes described as the mathematics of the unknown — it helps us represent things we do not yet know and work logically to find answers. Many adults remember finding algebra difficult at school, but mathematics learning has changed significantly. Today students are encouraged to explore patterns, discuss ideas and build understanding step by step. With practice and persistence, algebra is something anyone can learn and an important foundation for many future careers.