STEM

STEM Challenge at Simonds College

On Monday, 20 October, sixteen Year 8 students had the opportunity to travel to Simonds College to take part in a STEM competition against the Simonds students.  They travelled to the College after lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there, completing a range of STEM-based activities in groups.

The teams worked through four activities, each requiring problem-solving, collaboration and time-management skills, as there was only twenty minutes to complete each task. One of these activities involved constructing a tower using limited materials.  The towers were judged on height, structural integrity and teamwork.  Another rotation focused on codebreaking, where students decoded messages made of symbols, or maths questions that used emojis instead of numbers.  This task also included a bonus round where students attempted a cryptic crossword puzzle to earn additional points.

The next activity challenged students to apply their understanding of engineering.  Each group had to build a futuristic vehicle that could either operate on another planet or as a sustainable alternative on Earth.  

The final rotation was STEM trivia with forty questions - ten relating to each letter of STEM.  Students could also earn bonus points by recalling as many digits of Pi as possible.

Overall, the day was a success, with Academy ultimately defeating Simonds.  It was a valuable experience that allowed students to extend their STEM knowledge and meet students from another school. We would like to thank Mrs Marriott and Ms Neil for supporting us throughout the day, and the Simonds staff and students for their hospitality. It was an excellent day.

Lucy C & Willa C

(8 Red)

Ms Colleen Marriott

Science Teacher

Victorian Coding Challenge 

On Thursday, 23 October, together with Eliza L, Angelina Z and Rose H, we represented the Academy at the Victorian Coding Challenge, Stage 2.  It was an in-person event held at the Community Hub at Docklands.  

Competitions included a mix of paper and pen problems and online coding challenges. The morning included maths relay games which required problems to be solved and then run it over to a moderator to check before proceeding to the next set of problems. 

The activity was high energy.  The competition also included coding challenges that consisted of problems that could be solved by creating a program in Python.  The final part of the day, agent games, was my favourite.  In agent games we were given a platform to write code for a tic-tac-toe styled game.  The goal was to program a bot that would win the most games and then pit it against all the other school’s bots.  It was very exciting at one point as we were leading in this section of the competition and Academy’s name flashed on the leader’s board, but alas we dropped to third place! 

Overall the day was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to build coding and critical thinking skills, and interact with other schools.

Monika T

(Year 9 Barak)

Mr Eric Chan

Mathematics Learning Leader