Student & Staff Achievements  

Koonung Wins! 

KSC’s Ruby Clark, Samuel Yao and Emmett Unterberger just won the top award for “2018 Aurecon Bridge Building competition (Vic)”. This international STEM challenge for Year 8/9 students encourages interest through engineering, teamwork, design, construction and project management. The competition is to build the best possible bridge with limited materials to span 650mm.

The competition was held at ScienceWorks. This year KSC won against a field of approximately 40 nominating schools.

Under the PBL curriculum, students can join the Bridge Building class. We learn Computer Aided Design, Material Science, Project Management and Construction Techniques. We form teams in class to construct bridges that get tested by our teacher at the end of term.

Three lucky students from first semester's class get to compete at the State based competition. We set out, using our knowledge gained during the term to make a new bridge. We worked through the holidays finalising design and building sub-assemblies before bringing it all together. Samuel lead the construction phase. 

Competition day was exciting, we saw lots of different bridges all designed within competition guidelines compete for excellence in: Efficiency, Strength, Innovation, Digital Design and All-Rounder (All-Rounder is the highest combined score of all categories and rated the top prize). During the competition at Scienceworks, we watched as each team’s bridge took ever increasing weights till finally and spectacularly breaking. We were really impressed, our real bridge broke the same way as Aurecon predicted from our digital design, this is proof Samuel made the construction nearly as perfect as the  design.

Nearly half available competition points are presented by judge assessment. Ruby presented on behalf of the team  and focused on  our  teams knowledge of Engineering Principles, Design capability and focus during construction. “Ruby did well” said Samuel and the results stand testament to such. The KSC team were overjoyed to hear the Koonung Secondary College announced First place “All-Rounder”.

Grinning , our team was presented on stage with $1000  for KSC and $100 for  each student. We couldn’t wait to get back to school with the great news on our win.

Thank you to  parent volunteer, Carmel Clark, for assisting us on the day. We were delighted to pass on the  great news first to our PBL Teacher, Ms Caine, and then to our Principal, Ms Lee. The $1000  winning bridge can be seen in the College administration foyer. The winning students have been asked to participate in deciding how best to allocate the winning prize money.

Ruby Clark 8C Emmett Unterberger  8C & Samuel Yao 8E