Health & PE Area News

Yr 10 Fit and Healthy visits Deakin University's  BIOLAB

To support the learning in Fit and Healthy, our class headed out to Deakin University, Waurn Ponds for a unique experience.

The Geelong Biolab hosted us at the amazing Deakin University facility called, The School of Exercise & Nutrition Sciences. Deakin University opened their doors during trimester break to allow our students to experience high technology laboratories in a program designed by Biolab called The Winning Edge.

Our girls experienced three workshops in different high tech specialist laboratories. The experts at Biolab together with Deakin University students, ran us through an Anatomy laboratory discovering the workings of the main joints of the body. Then we moved to a Biomechanics laboratory where each girl walked and ran over force plates and analysed foot strike data streamed through banks of computers. Camera analysis on our students running on a treadmill compared their data to Usain Bolt’s 100m race statistics. In the final session we were all put through our paces with a bicycle ergometer test to predict our VO2 Maximum.

Being involved in this partnership between Biolab, Deakin University and Matthew Flinders Girls was a fantastic taste of university life. It was perfect timing for our girls as they work hard in their VCE years and ponder what might be for their own futures. In addition to The Winning Edge presenters, a lecturer in Sports Science and under graduates shared their own experiences of university life and gave our girls a fabulous insight into the educational possibilities that lie beyond Matthew Flinders Girls.

Joy Carr