The Regional Engagement Enterprise

TREE – ‘Rethinking Learning’

There has been a frenzied pace to TREE in the last few weeks of Term 2 with projects in Industrial Technology, Geography, Information Software Technology, Art, Year 3 and Year 5. To see and hear more, become a follower of our blog theregionalengagemententerprise.com or follow us on Instagram (tree_kws).

Information Software Technology

Mr Chapman’s Year 9 class have been building soil sensors as part of a collaboration with local telemetry company Porosity. The students began by using microbits and scratch to code a rudimentary soil probe. They programmed the sensor to read the voltage between two nails placed into the soil. Following this, they built gypsum sensors and tested (with the kind help of Mr Zola) how increasing the volume of water in dry sand affected the readings taken.

The students then headed out to Windermere, the new school farm, to set up a weather station with the help of current parent Mr Frazer Slack-Smith from Porosity. This station feeds back information to the school via Porosity’s website. The students presented their project to visitors at The Regional Technology Expo the following day.

Next term the students will first be learning how to use arduinos to build more advanced sensors before programming their own data logger to collect readings which can be remote accessed to gain real-time weather data. They will also design a website to show this data, linking it into the FROG dashboard so that it can be accessed by the school and the farm manager.

Archibull 2018

On Thursday 14th June two young country champion farmers came to talk to us in our school auditorium about the wool industry; Peta Bradley and Caitlin Heppner. The purpose of their talk was to introduce us to the wool industry and tell us about their experiences and how they became involved in this industry.

Caitlin Heppner grew up around sheep and wool in South Australia. She won the national fleece judging competition and got her wool classing certificate at age 18. She started her career young – at just 14, learning to shear, having acted as a rouseabout since she was 10. She spoke to us about how she went to Canberra to participate in the Country to Canberra event which gave the opportunity for young farmers to be heard.

Peta Bradley is a geneticist in Armidale, she studied agriculture at CSU in Wagga Wagga. She also grew up on a farm and her mum worked at a school, her dad an agronomist and her brother a diesel mechanic. Their farm is near Gilgandra which is about 2.5 hours NNW of Orange. She talked to us about how she starts the process of genetics. When the lambs are first born, they are weighed to get data to track breeding patterns for improving wool production. Every wool farmer wants to improve their micron to make their wool more valuable and their farm more profitable.

The talk was really useful in helping us to understand more about the wool industry for designing our Archibull (http://archibullprize.com.au). We need to showcase how the wool industry has changed and how it is managing climate change, food security, biosecurity and succession planning.

By 8EN1

Year 3 Models of the Mountain

Year 3 have been busily creating their ‘Models of the Mountain’ following their exploratory visit to Mount Canobolas. Check out some of the (nearly) finished articles.

Tom Riley

Director of TREE