STEM

Year 8 DTE

The nominees for the annual Art vs Language photoshop competition were truly incredible this year. Students were tasked with creating an artwork that would represent a language they were interested in, using a word or phrase in that language. It was so difficult to choose a winner out of all these entries! However, I think you’ll agree, our winner Tayah D, was very deserving of the prize for her incredible Koi artwork.

Year 12 Applied Computing: Data Analytics

Our Year 12 Data Analytics students have finally completed their SAT! Way back in Term 1, each student chose a unique topic, researched and collected data on that topic, manipulated the data in both spreadsheet and database software and then finally created an infographic on their findings.

Here are some of the finished infographics – months of work in the making! Well done to these students, we are proud of the grit it takes to complete a long portfolio piece like this.

Science Talent Search 2026

All our teams for the 2026 Science Talent Search have now submitted their entries and are eagerly awaiting the results of this prestigious competition! Each year STAV (Science Teachers Association of Victoria) runs this competition (for over 75 years!) with a new theme each year. This year’s theme of ‘Seeds of Science’ proved a great one for our teams, with videos, games and experiments galore being produced. Incidentally, this will also be the theme of Science Week coming up in the last week of Term 3.

Good luck to all our STS students!

The University of Melbourne Girl Power in Engineering and IT Program

Kilbreda has a long and proud history with successful applicants in The University of Melbourne’s Girl Power in Engineering and IT program. This program, designed to encourage young women interested in STEM, runs for four years. If you are currently a Year 8 student who may be interested in applying for next year, please speak to Ms Donoghue or Ms Chuck for further details.

Below are some of the experiences of some of our current candidates.

Student Reflections

During the July school holidays, I was lucky to be chosen to attend the Girl Power in Engineering and IT camp. It was an exciting and nerve-racking experience and one that I am really proud of! The four-year Girl Power program consists of a camp in Year 9, work experience in Year 10 and mentoring in Year 11 and 12. The program encourages girls to get involved, learn new concepts and skills in IT and engineering. 

The first part of the application is answering online questions, for example “Why are you interested in this program?” and “Why did you apply for the program?”. If you get through to the second stage, it is a Zoom interview, where you are put into groups of five to six girls and you need to work together to prepare a presentation on a topic. For example, my group presented an app for renewable energy. After that, there is a one-on-one interview. Then you wait and see if you got in the program, which had a maximum of 40 spots. I was nervous but I reminded myself that when you want to be good at things or be accepted you don’t know until you have tried.

The camp is four days long and you get to stay at The University of Melbourne accommodation. You learn lots of new things and make lots of new friends. When you first arrive, you get free merch like a hoodie, bag and drink bottle. Activities I enjoyed at the camp included a tour of the campus, coding microbits, bridge building, making wooden planes and testing if they can fly. We also worked in groups to problem solve an issue in the world relating to IT and engineering. This year’s theme was Super Heroes and my group chose to focus on 3D printing human organs. There was also a panel night where five women talked about their jobs in the engineering and IT field. This included biomedical engineering, software development and quality management at Boeing Aerostructures, which were jobs I hadn’t heard about before. My favourite part of the program was meeting new people with similar interests to me. I would encourage others to apply for it next year because you learn new things and have so much fun. If you don’t apply you are missing out on a lifetime experience that you will never get again.

Clara T

Year 9

This year, we participated in the Girl Power in Engineering and IT’s work experience program. Throughout the week, we explored various disciplines inside the major. This included attending talks on academic life with Professor Andrew Ooi, discussing the future of AI, learning about sustainable design with Dr Elisa Lumantarna, building prosthetic limbs with Engineers Without Borders, and discovering Digital Twins with the Infrastructure Engineering team. Overall, these lectures helped us get a better understanding of each discipline offered under Engineering and IT.

The second part of the program was a tour around the university and the Boeing Aerostructures factory. For the university tour, we were led around to several labs and were taught about the different areas of engineering that are available for us to pursue in the future. 

We went inside a lab that was fully temperature controlled to be below freezing so that the scientists could study the movement of ice in the Antarctic region. We also saw a lab that was filled with large wind tunnels that modelled the flow of air on plane wings. Our favourite lab had a large treadmill that could simulate earthquakes, while tracking the person’s movements so engineers could study how human limbs move. The following day we went to Boeing Aerostructures Australia and saw people building aeroplane wings and rudders. 

We were taught about all the really interesting careers that engineering and IT can lead to and the many growing opportunities for women in these fields. Overall, The University of Melbourne’s Engineering and IT work experience program was such an amazing experience that we feel so lucky to have gone on. 

Namie P and Kara G

Year 10

Adrienne Donoghue

Learning Leader: Digital Technologies