Victorian High Ability Program

The Victorian High Ability Program (VHAP) is a Department of Education initiative launched in 2020 to cater for the needs of students identified as being of higher ability in either English or Mathematics.

Throughout Term 1, 13 of our Year 8 students participated in the program. Students attended one ‘live lesson’ each week with students from other schools. The lesson was taught by a teacher from Virtual Schools Victoria.

Congratulations to the following students who participated:

Tariq Afroz, Mitch Buckingham, Hailey Buckley, Sky Cheok, Zyon Darmawan, Mattias Geary, Ezra Hapuarachchi, Noah Johnson, Kaustubh Kishore, Annalise Main, Mabel Nimco, Jackson Peters and Katherine Styles.

These students will be recognised with a certificate during Term 2. Further below, Katherine has written her own contribution regarding the program. Thanks, Katherine!

In Term 2, 10 of our Year 7 students have been nominated for the program.

Congratulations to:

Callum Coombs, Eva Faloona, Thomas Fidge, Grace Limanto, Hannah Lin, Huy Nguyen, Ashley Robinson, Miral Sheta, Manreet Singh, Ryder Thomson.

We are looking forward to more Wantirna College students participating in this program in the future.

Mark Oudshoorn

Leader of Maths/Numeracy

For the whole of this term, a group of students in Year 8, including myself, participated in an extended maths program called VHAP (Victorian High-Ability Program). VHAP is a new program that was launched this year by the Victorian Department of Education where students are selected by the Department to participate in this program. It occurred once a week and each class went for 55 minutes. Each week we would get together and join an online call with the teacher who guided our learning, and we learnt some new maths-based skills and extended our thinking by learning about new topics. It was really enjoyable, and we got a lot out of each lesson. To add to the weekly classes, we had approximately 1 hours’ worth of homework from each lesson which we worked on in our time. This helped us extend and consolidate our learnings. We learnt about such topics as the Fibonacci Sequence, 3-digit algorithms, what paradoxes are and many other interesting concepts. It was a great experience and extremely rewarding to be involved in this program.

Katherine Styles 8S