STEAM Education

St James STEM Expo

Telstra Smart Farm Update

Ross and John (Telstra) have showcased our new smart farm devices to the year 5 and 6 students and also some of the St James dads on the final day of the STEM Expo a couple of weeks back. We’ve logged into our school account and had a play with how to read the graphs produced by a variety of sensors.

We’re now at the stage of mounting the devices and will be doing so on Saturday morning.

Ross, John and Brendan Anderson (all round life enthusiast and nice guy), along with Mr Mac and Mal Rademaker (Bowden Construction & St James handyman) will team up to ensure our ‘smart farm technology’ is securely mounted atop our soon-to-be Telstra smart garden in the Tilley playground. Sensors included in our package include devices that can record temperature and rainfall and in the near future, we’ll be adding a sensor to monitor UV rays hitting our school. All members of our school community will be able to access live information coming from our school in terms of temperature, wind, rainfall and uv ratings from anywhere in the world!

In Term 4, with student support, we aim to start the actual garden and plant some vegetables and other plant life. Mr Flanagan can see a swaying cornfield on the horizon. Stay tuned :)

Brendan checks out the inside of the rain gauge.

Ross, Brendan and John discuss mounting possibilities on Wednesday afternoon.

First location of the Telstra Smartfarm, Tilley Playground.

James McMahon

STEM Leader