STEAM News

STEAM Week 2021

From 16th-20th August, the College celebrated STEAM week with a number of events. These included a remote Escape Room around this year's theme of Food: Different by Design, a few favourite activities, and some new challenges for students, such as the Card House Engineering Challenge and the daily STEAM riddle. 

The Daily Riddle

Every day our STEAM captain Chris Thorp posted a new Riddle for students to answer. House points were awarded for participating and a prize given to the daily winner. 

Overall house points came to the following totals:

With Ignis house making a big effort on the last day to take out the winning place. 

Well done to everyone!

The Escape Room

The Escape Roomsaw students completing seven challenges in order to find the code to unlock a flooding research facility. There were many students who completed the challenge at lunch and during their Science classes.  Congratulations to Leo Brasch, Joel Arul, Ethan Nguyen, Michael Haynes and Jacob Crociani who completed it in the fastest 5 times.

The Periodic Table of Cupcakes

The Periodic Table of Cupcakes made its second appearance as a remote activity, but that didn't diminish the participants' creativity with many amazing looking cupcakes produced. Congratulations to the following students who were the placegetters in this competition. 

1st place: 

Isabella Pearson for her imaginative additions of 'samples' of the chosen                            elements. 

2nd Place: 

Emma Parfitt for her creative design choices to pair the elements named after               places with their flags. 

3d Place:

Claudia Cadman and Rupini Marimuthu for their excellent choice to                                       create cupcakes of elements with names and symbols that are a play on their names. 

Other Competitions

There were some fantastic entries in the other competitions as well with Jade Lakey and Talia Walker's entries in the Bottle Design Challenge, Jack Jenkin's entry to the Card Tower Challenge and Alex Brotan, Max Michailaros, Paisley Noble, Ilija Simonovski and Matt Wong's entries in the Paper Plane competition all showing how STEAM and design thinking can be applied to almost anything. 

Staff vs Students STEAM Kahoot Quiz

The week was capped off with a highly competitive Staff vs Students STEAM week Kahoot quiz.  Well done to Leo Brasch, Emma Parfit and Ms Lim for their place on the podium

Total points saw the students defeat the teachers for a second year in a row, with students on 401,454 points and staff on 180,998 points.  

Next year we will defeat you!

Swinburne Youth Space Challenge

Fantastic news from the Swinburne Space challenge teams!!! 

This year we were privileged to be part of the Swinburne space challenge - a pilot project by Swinburne university to engage students in space science and engineering. We had 12 students participating in two teams. The first phase was for a term where students visited Swinburne university for an induction. During this they were taken to the various laboratories of the university to get an insight into the research conducted. They were also able to see a short movie about space and the space programme. The teams were provided mentorship by PHD students and then were set the challenge of designing an experiment that could impact space travel and space exploration. The teams had to ensure the equipment size and weight was minimal. The winning experiment would then be conducted on the international space station with the winning team getting a chance to work alongside researchers from Swinburne university.  

It is moment of great pride to VIEWBANK College that both teams secured the first and second place. 

The team with Madeline Luvaul, Paisley Noble, Belle Shi and Tarnie Jones won the challenge with their experiment titled “Mag-riculture”  

Heartiest congratulations also to our team of Troy Ferreira, Mikayla Moodley, Aditya Shetty, Kyle Yi Chen, Jasper Brown, Tiancheng Zheng (Bill), Arvin Vazifdar and Zeki Yuksel who came a very close with their project “Cosmosis” 

The project continues for the rest of the year with students working with Swinburne to finalise their project to be sent to space.  

Girls in STEM 

On Friday 18th June, a team of 5 girls attended an online activity/workshop organised through the collaboration between Mathematical Association of Victoria, Ford and Engineers without Borders.  Our students from Year 9 and 10 attended the workshop at school.  The students were able to interact with women STEM leaders and ask questions on their career and work.  Priyani Madan from ARUP, Suzanne Murphy from Modelez, Emma Peel from FORD, Casey C and Gem Lloyd from Bureau of Meteorology were some of the speakers 

They were also given challenges through the day to understand various mathematical and physics concepts through simple activities. 

At the end all the teams were then given a challenge designed by Engineers without Borders with one of the team being an online mentor. 

Our Students won the challenge with their ingenuity and creative thinking skills. 

Fantastic work Paisley Noble, Neha Hiremani, Kianne McHugh, Isabella Pearson and Abby Frazzetto! 

Ms Vine

Mr Mulhall

Ms Nair

The Education Perfect Science Championships 2021

From the 16th of August to the 23rd of August, a team of 23 students participated in the Education Perfect Science Championships. 

Schools from New Zealand and Australia participated. 

The online event covered questions across each of the scientific disciplines. 

Students participated extremely well in the event and they achieved both collective and individual accolades.

Viewbank College achieved 2nd overall out of 2,0212 schools.

As well as being 2nd overall in Australia out of 1,488 schools.

Nine individual certificates were awarded. 

3 students placed within the top 20!

• Poorvansh Skulka 5th
• Ziru Zhang 6th
• Nicholas Dafopoulos 17th.

These 3 students along with Isabella Pearson were also awarded Elite achievements.

Ali Basim and Frey Putra were awarded Emerald.

Roza Alikani was awarded Gold.

Neha Hiremani was awarded Silver

Ramji Shankar was awarded Credit.

Congratulations to all students who participated in this event. They added to their scientific knowledge and also represented the school in an international event.

Ms Curnow