Digital Safety and STEM
@ St Louis
All students attending St Louis de Montfort's Aspendale have the right to feel safe. The care, safety and wellbeing of children and young people is a fundamental responsibility of all within our school.
Cybersafety Project
One of our favourite Melbourne-based cybersafety experts, and one we've mentioned a few times on this page, is the Cybersafety Project.
They offer a range of really informative webinars for parents focused on how to best manage technology at home as well as helpful hints on how to have conversations with your children around being online.
You can also head to this page https://cybersafetyproject.com.au/families/ and signup for some brilliant resources such as the one below.
We hope you find what we share informative and helpful. Please feel free to send over any other helpful resources or articles you find connected to digital safety to me at twood@stlouisaspendale.com
A quick snapshot of our work in STEM this week
Year 6
Year 6 are exploring networks in the world and how they contribute to our health, emotional and physical.
As part of this learning, they will be designing and coding their own game. This week we used Makey Makey to develop our own game controllers to play some of the classic games many of us 'older folk' grew up with (the old Mario vs Sonic debate rages on!).
There was a great buzz in the room when they realised that they could control their device using Play-doh as well as cups of water!
Year 5
Year 5 started to explore healthy technology last week, including things we use for our diet, and wearable tech that promotes a healthy lifestyle.
Our challenge this term is to go through the design thinking cycle in order to come up with their own technology idea which could help someone who needs support in this area. It could be an app, a new kind of smartwatch, or something we've never seen before!
We introduced them to Micro:bit, a wonderful circuit-based device that they were able to code into a digital pedometer. The challenge then became to see how many steps they could track and to test how accurate it was.
As always in STEM, we made links back to the Sustainable Development Goals/Global Goals. If you would like to know what these are and why they are so important in ensuring the future for our children, check out the link below.
