Spotlight on Technologies

Technologies at Mount Alvernia College offers a range of subjects that teach our students life-long valuable skills including time management, decision making, collaboration, adaptability, and resilience. 

 In our classes, teachers facilitate learning experiences as an opportunity to identify and solve problems.  Recently, our students have been presented with opportunities outside of their classroom to showcase their knowledge and skills.  Congratulations to all students and teachers involved – we are proud of you!

Design 

Under the guidance of Ms Justine Hawkins, Year 10 Design students were given the opportunity to attend the Brisbane Big Ideas Challenge hosted by Future Anything at QUT (Kelvin Grove) at the start of Term 3. The focus topic was IA in Sport. Discussions were led by a panel of experts including the Technology Integration minister for Tourism Queensland and experts from VALD (a Queensland company that designs and makes instruments that gather data on the training and performance of top athletes to aid improvement). 

The design brief the students had to work to was ‘as an entrepreneur, pitch an innovative idea that improves participation, performance, or the spectator experience of a chosen sport’. The students gathered into groups based on their areas of interest and used critical and creative thinking to develop a concept and prototype that they pitched to the panel of experts. The winning team comprised of 3 students, 2 from Mount A! Their idea was ‘Making the Disabled Abled’ by developing a sport interaction platform app. The concept included being able to view the action on the field via body cameras fitted on players. The judges considered this to be a highly innovative and real-world solution. A runner group featuring our students were given an honourable mention as they attempted to address the issue of how to deal with ‘that time of the month’ and female performance in sport. Congratulations to our students and a very big thank you to Ms Hawkins for her commitment to Design Technologies. 

Digital 

Recently, the Year 9 and Year 10 Digital Technologies students have been designing, building, programming, and evaluating LEGO EV3 rescue robots. The Year 9 students have looked at how a robot could travel through a simulated city area to rescue a person from a dangerous chemical hazard. This has the students looking at methods to follow lines, avoid obstacles and go up and down ramps. The Year 10 students have been following a similar process but looking at how a robot might be used in an area where a disaster has collapsed buildings. These robots need to find their way through a maze of rooms, broken walls, uneven floors and then identify the location of people and deliver to them a rescue package. The robot then needs to find its way back out of this maze. 

Two of the students in Year 9 joined the schools extra-curricular club “DigiClub” and entered their robot in the Brisbane Regional RoboCup Junior event. In over four rounds of competition in the Secondary Line category, they managed to achieve a total placing them in the top quarter of the field – a great result for their first ever competition. Robotics is certainly on the rise at Mount Alvernia College!  Congratulations to Imogen McKenna and Hannah Crowhurst, and a very big thank you to Mr Alex Bush for encouraging our students to use their knowledge and skills beyond the classroom.

In Year 8 Digital Solutions students are mastering Python programming, preparing them for a technology-driven future. They are exploring variables, functions, decisions, loops and file-access as they learn how to create powerful programs. This work will culminate in their own project, where they will use the EDGE process (explore, develop, generate, evaluate) to solve an identified problem. Through this problem-solving process, students are developing their critical and creative thinking skills, and preparing to shape the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Food & Nutrition 

Year 9 Food Technology students have been in discussions with Mr Pratt about sustainability and La Foresta.  In particular, students have learnt about the importance of consuming fruits and vegetables in season and how to reduce your food miles.   Using this knowledge, students are designing and creating 4 new products lines for the ‘La Foresta’ food label incorporating school grown produce and a native Australian flavour in at least one food item. 

Food Science with an Italian Focus is the unit currently being studied by Yr 10 Food and Nutrition students. Students have been engaged in producing doughs for focaccia and observing the fermentation process in action. In their pasta making they have been able to see the role of gluten in action and how gelatinisation impacts their sauce making. Their learning of these processes lays the foundation for their upcoming project folio where they prototype a range of design solutions and line extension products for Leggos.

Year 11 students are currently studying Unit 2 Food Drivers and Emerging Trends. In this image, students are exploring the rise in popularity of fermented foods, its nutritional properties as well as applying their sensory evaluation skills by trying foods such as kimchi, sauerkraut, miso soup, kefir and kombucha. Students are now beginning their next project folio exploring a consumer market of their choice and creating a new and innovative product range to meet their needs.