Around the College
Science Week
The 17th to the 21st of August saw the annual celebration of National Science Week! The theme for 2020 was ‘Deep Blue: Innovation for the future of our oceans’. Australia’s vast oceans are at the heart of the energy, food and economic future of our country. There were a variety of activities that all students had the opportunity to participate in throughout the week.
The week started with an excursion to UniSA, where Year 9 students spent the day exploring “STEM and Humanity”. Students applied their scientific knowledge to several real-life scenarios focused on solutions to humanitarian issues. They employed their scientific skills to solve problems around 3D printing, GPS and water filtration for poorer countries in South East Asia and South America.
Fun ocean facts were presented on the screens around the school during the week. Students went fishing under the ANZAC Pavilion with Year 7 student Aimi Tong winning the competition by catching 16 fish! Year 12 students James Cork-Gorringe and Bradley Llewellyn, Year 11 students Paige Manning, Lili Fountain and Latisha Barr aka The Fish Hunters and Year 11 student Ryan Tang solved the daily cryptic clues to ‘Find Nemo’. Year 7 students engaged in Virtual Reality (VR) technology to view the ocean depths and Friday saw the school wide Science Week Kahoot! This kahoot proved very popular and had many students engage with it. In addition, all Care Groups participated in the annual Care Group Caption Competition, with the winners to be announced at the whole school assembly this week.
Both the Year 7 and Year 8 cohorts were engaged and entertained by SciWorld presentations. In this show there were fire experiments and big bangs! Year 7 students were engaged with activities around Chemistry, Energy and Forces and incredible explosions. Others learnt about physical and chemical changes and chemical reactions as well as cool experiments that they can try at home (with parent supervision of course!). It was a great show and served as a fitting finale to a week of celebrations!
We are all looking forward to next year when we will do it all again and engage in a celebration of Science with the rest of Australia.
Dr Gavin Marcus
Science Learning Leader
Lauren Gray
Science Teacher
STEM for Humanity Science Excursion
As a part of the lead up to Science Week in week five, fifteen Year 9 students were selected to visit the UniSA campus for a STEM for Humanity program. The day program involved connecting STEM to real life occurrences and humanitarian causes. We took part in three enjoyable but informative activities. These activities included the usage of GPS coordinates, 3D printing and water filtration.
The program educated us on the largest slum in Kenya named Kibera in Nairobi. Kibera had never been mapped by the government and was deemed ‘non-existent’. This meant the government was not required to properly care for Kibera or its residents. This was clearly unacceptable, and it was decided in 2009 that people in Kibera would be given GPS to track places of significance around the slum. We were able to simulate this process of mapping the slum of Kibera.
When an earthquake measuring a magnitude of 7.8 hit Nepal in April of 2015, over 9000 people lost their lives and over 23,000 were injured. The earthquake damaged many kilometres of water pipes. To fix this issue, 3D printing was used to create pipe connectors. We were challenged to create a 3D object that would connect three pipes together, a similar process that was used in Nepal.
In our third task, we had to attempt to create filters to filter disgusting, dirty water. Some of the countries included wealthier countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where they could start off with roughly $400, down to poorer countries such as Ethiopia and Cambodia, where they started with as little as $25, to spend on development. This related to the real world as people still must do this daily to get at least a little bit of drinking water to survive. We learnt so much about real world applications of science.
Sienna Edwards and Jesse Isaac
Year 9 students
South Australian Junior Chess League
We have been fortunate enough with the ease of restrictions over the last term to be able to enter a shortened version of the South Australian Junior Chess League in 2020. While the format is shorter, and held over four consecutive Friday evenings, Endeavour College has been playing competitive Chess against other schools from around the state. Our team, which comprises of Naomi Schubert, Jacob Nitschke, Raiden Bruce and our Chess Captain, Joshua Schubert are currently in second place after three nights and six rounds of competition. Last Friday night the team faced Walford, squaring off at 2 games each, and Concordia Gold, where we won 3 games to 1. Our team still has a chance of taking out the title this Friday night as we are in second place overall; however, regardless of the result, our team has achieved so much both as a team, and as individual players, and we look forward to the final installment this Friday.
Mark Slaven
Chess Club Coordinator
Endeavour Chess Challenge
The annual Chess Challenge is on again for 2020 and at present, we have completed qualifying for the middle years category. The participation levels this year are at their highest ever, with 32 students across all year levels participating and it is great to see so many students of all different age ranges enjoying their Chess.
After a week long qualifying round, we have our top six qualifiers in the Middle Years category. Congratulations to: Naomi Schubert, Aiden Simmons, Jyhlan Mills, Michael Mallet, Dipak Patel and Luca Do on making it to the College finals. The second qualifying round for the Senior Years category begins this week. Once the final six have been decided, our live College finals in the mall will take place across Week 6. I want to thank all competitors for their enthusiasm and participation so far and we look forward to finding out who will be the Endeavour Chess Champion for 2020.
Mark Slaven
Chess Club Coordinator