Victorian 

High Ability Program

Matt Lynch

Victorian High Ability Program Coordinator

On Monday the 9th of December Brunswick Secondary College hosted, coordinated and led a masterclass for students enrolled in the the Victorian High Ability Program. 

Students from Preston High School joined Brunswick Secondary College students in two, one-hour face-to-face sessions designed to extend high ability students. The masterclass was designed to complement a series of online sessions focused on challenging students that have performed well in Mathematics or English.

Mathematics students were equipped with counters, diagrams and cubes to solve problems that began simply and progressed to being more complex where students were encouraged to generate a mathematical rule that could be applied in all cases. in some cases, students created their own physical shapes in order to visualise the problems. For example, students were asked to find  the shortest path around a hamiltonian cube (the shortest path that travels through all the vertices of the cube).

Meanwhile, the English class examined the Dystopian genre and compared it to the circumstances of our current world through excerpts from two different texts: The Magical Everything by Jenny Pinto, and No Shadow Without Light by Luke Gracias. In groups, students then created a visual representation (posters accompanied by discourse) of Utopia and presented these to the class.

Anonymous feedback was drawn from the participants, Students described the masterclass as a “good challenge and interesting”. Others felt like they were being “creative and productive”. Another group of students expressed that they were “enjoying it" and "it was good to hear what students from other schools have to say.” 

Other student feedback included:

“Great session where I could interact with like-minded peers from another school and I could share my ideas and collaborate with them.”

“It was very good to meet people from other schools and to further my understanding about Utopian and Dsytopian worlds.”

“It was interesting to know it is possible to make a line with every two numbers adding to a square number.”

“I found the explanation of expansion and how to apply Pascal's triangle in other mathematical equations interesting.”

Special thanks to Alison Sanza and Fiona O’Meara for organising and conducting the masterclasses. Also, thank you to Nicholas Martin, Jack Collins and Maria Vendetti for their assistance.