ICT

NCSS CHALLENGE

The second NCSS challenge came to an end on Sunday 29 August with several McKinnon students once again showing tremendous coding skills to complete this 5 week competition. A special mention goes to the following students:

Khushi Agarwal (Year 7) - Perfection, NCSS Beginner Level

Maleesha Dharmadasa (Year 7) - Perfection, NCSS Beginner Level

Stefan Tale (Year 7) - Perfection, NCSS Beginner Level

Linh Vu (Year 8) - Perfection, NCSS Beginner Level

Maggie Zhou (Year 10) - Perfections in NCSS Intermediate Level

The most difficult level of the NCSS Challenge is Advanced and this is notoriously hard to complete. 

An enormous congratulations to Kevin Yu (Year 11) who not only completed the course but gained a perfect score of 250. Well done, Kevin.

YEAR 7 RESEARCH PROJECT

Whether it is fabulous Fiji, paradise in Peru or spectacular South Africa that you would like to visit then take a look at what our Year 7s have been producing during remote learning. Part of the Year 7 ICT course is to research a country of your choice and produce a Google website showcasing various aspects of the country chosen. Students learn to use different search operators and search tools available in Google. 

For example, did you know that if you add site:au to your search, it will only find Australian websites? If you would like to find out the Internet country domain for anywhere in the world, just click on this link.

One of the other main focuses of this topic was learning the importance of citing your sources and giving credit where credit is due. The students used a Google extension called Cite this for me which allowed them to correctly cite all their sources including text, images and video files. This is a critical skill to learn for all school subjects and will be invaluable throughout their school and university careers. 

After carrying out some research on topics such as Culture, Interesting Facts and Geography, the students have to create an engaging Google website on their chosen country. Above are some sample pages of places that hopefully we might be able to visit in the very near future!

Shirley Munro

ICT KLA Manager