ST NORBERT NEWS

Academic Excellence 

Australian Geography Competition

Over one hundred of our Year Eight to Year Twelve students have been chosen to participate in the 2025 Australian Geography Competition. They are competing against over 600 schools and 54000 students around Australia. The online competition assesses the student’s geographical knowledge and skills. Good luck to all the students competing this week or next!

Computational and Algorithmic Thinking (CAT) Competition

We wish the Senior Maths Specialist students’ good luck as they sit the CAT competition next week. CAT competition is an online problem-solving competition that seeks to identify a student’s computer programming potential. 

Young Geographers of the Year competition

There is an opportunity for students in each year level to compete in the Young Geographers of the Year competition. If you are interested in “Restoring our Environment” and sustainability, then this is the competition for you. If you are interested, please email me for more information.

Academic Excellence Program

In Term One we ran an Introduction to Academic Excellence Program. What a great response we had with more than 30 enthusiastic students meeting early Friday mornings to enhance their learning and be involved in some challenging and fun activities. The buzz in the room each week was tremendous.

The students have learnt about organisation, habits, teamwork and complex thinking. Their chosen project had an engineering flavour. They had to research and then build towers out of only 20 sheets of paper and one roll of sticky tape. To win the teams had to build either the tallest tower and/or the strongest tower. Either way the tower had to hold at least one 400g can of food for one minute.

 

Final results: 

Congratulations to the following teams:

  • Strongest tower, holding 5.2kg was “Leaning Tower of Paper” Team (Pratyaksh Sangwan, Byron Kerr, Natalie Van Der Westhuyzen, Anaaddeep Jaidka, Jai Gonsalves)

  • Tallest tower, at a height of 39cm, Team “Dolphins” (Shiyu Chen, Crystal Shaiju, Helen Manuel, Eva Pulickan, Vanessa Johnson)

Our Academic Excellence Program is well and truly underway this term. We are gaining some insight into the interesting topic of Philosophy. Our students have some great thoughts and are learning how to look differently at our world. We are looking forward to a fun term.

 

Mrs L Cardenia

(Academic Excellence Coordinator)