Da Vinci Decathlon

During Week 9 four ASC teams - representing Years 7 to 10 - attended the 2021 Northern NSW Da Vinci Decathlon at TAS. This is an annual inter-school academic gala day designed to challenge and stimulate the minds of our students!

Our 8-student teams were presented challenges across 10 disciplines: mathematics, english, science, code breaking, engineering challenge, ideation, creative producer, art and poetry, cartography, and legacy. All teams performed exceedingly well by displaying great talent and team spirit. The Year 7 team were the overall winners in their category and will now progress to the state-wide competition.

Results:

Year 7: 1st in maths, science, ideation, engineering, creative producers and code breaking --- overall winners for Year 7;
Year 8: awesome creativity and collaborative effort;
Year 9 - 1st in creative producers and 2nd overall in Year 9;
Year 10 - 1st in art and poetry, 1st in legacy.

Science and Engineering Challenge

On 3 March, a group of Year 9 and 10 ASC students took part in the Science and Engineering Challenge. This awesome event is run by the University of Newcastle in collaboration with UNE School of Science and Technology and the Armidale Central Rotary Club. It provides students the opportunity to test their knowledge and challenge them in practical engineering tasks.

Under the guidance of Mr Stanley and Ms Cameron, our students took their places ready to have a crack at the many intricate and technical challenges.

We were off to a great start by producing a 210-rpm styrofoam turbine which smashed the competition. Also showing the other schools what we were made of were Hoshyar, Ghassan and Dilbreen who produced one of the best prosthetic hands we’ve seen in years!

During the second half of the day, we had heavy competition from TAS in the string-city task, while NEGS provided some stiff competition in the table building session.

But we had hope because our communication code breakers had finally figured out that it wasn’t as hard as it looked and our towers were growing to new heights!

Behind the scenes our bridge builders - Tom, Eden and Toby - were quietly and methodically working on their challenge. This task was the finale for the day, so we were all excited to discover how cleverly our bridge builders had executed their brief...

... before we spoil the ending, see how they went yourselves...

In all, it was a great day filled with challenging activities and a lot of fun. We expect to see a huge contingent of current Year 8 and 9 students lining up to share in the excitement next year!

Mr Stanley

Teacher - Science

Armidale Secondary College Newsletter

Our Future. Our Learning.

Issue 3 · 01 Apr 2021

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