Science & Digital Technologies

Science Week

Last week was National Science Week and this year the theme was “Glass: More than Meets the Eye”.  Across the week the students competed in a glass marble challenge in the Makerspace in the library, and engaged in fun educational activities and experiments throughout lunchtimes including making kaleidoscopes and looking at optical fibers.

Once again the annual Year 7 Science Quiz was held and this year all year 7 students were invited to the auditorium and asked to bring a device to individually compete to win their class a pizza lunch. Out of 70 consistent players across Year 7, the top student was Jemimah Douglas-Gillet from 7H (26525 points), closely followed by Niko Neighbour from 7C (26477 points) and Elliot Allen-Kiokakis from 7C (24136 points). There were literally seconds between first and second, as both students answered the same number of questions correct throughout the quiz. The winning students also won a canteen voucher to enjoy in their own time. 

The Science Department also ran a science quiz throughout the week across years 7-10.  Each student was asked to participate in a science quiz during their class time and the year level winners this year were: Year 7 - Jemimah Douglas-Gillet (7H), Year 8- Alex Gaudion (8G) and two Year 10 students with equal points - Alexander Pastras and Tobias Halfpenny.  Well done to all the competition winners this year. 

Digital Technologies

Students in Year 10 Digital Technologies have found that translating their programming and problem solving skills to the “real world” of robotics has been more difficult than they expected. Students began with challenges in the virtual robotics playground supplied by the VEX Robotics company, programming their virtual ‘bot to count, avoid obstacles and even draw. 

In transitioning to one of our VEX V5 robots our visiting Italian students, Diego and Giovanni, set the bar quite high with their first attempt. The challenge is to recreate the house drawn by the virtual robot, but with the additional challenge of a robot arm needing to pick up and put down the pen. This required inspired guesswork, or in the case of our winning team, careful measurements and redesigning of their algorithm. The locals staged a comeback with Brad and Anthony second past the post with “5%” input from Kaiden.