Maths Excursion

On Thursday of Week 6, ten Year 10 students attended a Maths in Surveying event at the National Environment Centre at Thurgoona. The event was hosted by the NSW Surveyors Taskforce and we were fortunate to have surveyors from Wagga, Albury and Sydney working with us during the day as we rotated through five surveying activities.

All activities were very hands-on and we were given the opportunity to use very sophisticated equipment, ranging from GPS trackers worth a few hundred dollars to Total Stations (previously known as theodolites, but more sophisticated) which were worth in excess of $40 000. This equipment uses GPS coordinates to calculate angles and laser beams to calculate distances. 

Our favourite activity of the day used this equipment to calculate the radius of a water tank. We used the Total Station to find the angles and distances and then we used trigonometry to do the calculations. Today’s surveyors do not need to do these calculations themselves because the equipment does it for them, but it was interesting to see how this would have been done in days gone by.

All of the surveyors who worked with us were passionate about their jobs. Many like the fact that it allowed them to work outside to capture and assess the data, as well as indoors to analyse and report. We learnt that there are many types of career opportunities available to surveyors, including working with drones and other 3D technology. This technology and computational analysis is underpinned by Maths.

Our students were excellent ambassadors for the College, engaging positively in all the activities. They also gained a lot of insight into surveying as a possible career, saying that it ‘challenged our brains’, ‘we did not know that these kinds of careers existed’ and ‘it was good to see so many women in this profession’. 

There is a shortage of surveyors not only in Australia but worldwide, and those who worked with us on the day are more than happy to host students for work experience. If you like Maths, Geography or Technology and this is a career that you might be interested in, you will find further information HERE.

Nikki Lloyd & Vicky Kenny | Mathematics Teachers