Superhack

Towards the end of last year, we entered a team of three (now) Year 12 students (Angelique Vargheese, Georgia Kelly and Jade Hobkirk) in the University of Melborune’s SuperHack competition. SuperHack is an annual high-school engineering hackathon for young women, non-binary and gender diverse students hosted by the Melbourne University Electrical Engineering Club (MUEEC).

Ange, Georgia and Jade travelled independently into the University of Melbourne for two days and worked with mentors to problem solve and create solutions. Their invention was a security system for when you go on holidays called “Access Denied.” The team came joint second and won prize money of $250 and starter Arduino sets. We are so proud of them as there were many teams and it can get very competitive!

DTE

It is with great anticipation and excitement that we welcome back our students to ‘Digi Tech’ for another fun year of DTE and STEM based learning!

Year 7

Our Year 7 students have made an excellent start so far, learning all about their laptops and how best to maintain them. They have now started learning the much-loved Adobe Photoshop, working with brushes, gradients, text, images, layers and combining images. We look forward to seeing their incredible works of art with this software.

Year 8

Our Year 8 students have been brushing up on their basic coding terms with the Hour of Code activities. They’ve been revising commands, events, loops, if statements and functions. Armed with these skills they will be designing and programming their own video games. Throughout the semester, classes will take turns to head to the STEM Room to build and code their Virtual Pets.  

We will also be running the STEM VTG (Video Game Challenge) again this year for students in Year 8 and 9. This is an extra-curricular activity for students who are interested in working in teams to create original games. The theme this year is a good one: Construction/Destruction. Any students interested in participating, please email me, Ms Donoghue on adrienne.donoghue@kilbreda.vic.edu.au

Year 10

Year 10 students started their website design journey in Headstart last year and have come back full of creativity and passion for all things HTML and CSS! After some initial training in the main tags and elements of HTML, they have now switched to the WYSIWYG (What you See is What you Get) software, Dreamweaver, to build their own websites.

As well as the fundamentals of coding websites, students are also learning about the principles and conventions of web design and exploring how to make websites accessible for all users.

VCE Applied Computing

Term 1 is all about data analysis in Unit 1 Applied Computing and Unit 3 Data Analytics! First, students brush up on their Microsoft Excel skills (some haven’t used it since Year 8!) and then go on to learn new and advanced spreadsheet skills. Second, they work on building a database with Microsoft Access and use several database functions such as forms, macros, queries and reports. The final stage is infographic design based on the data manipulation done in Excel and Access. Watch this space for some interesting examples of infographics!

STEM Leaders

A new year means a new set of STEM Leaders and I am delighted to introduce our two passionate student STEM leaders for 2023, Hayley Meure and Angelique Vargheese. We also have a sub-committee for the first time made up of three Year 12 students: Emily Cox, Jade Hobkirk and Georgia Kelly. We can’t wait to see all the fun STEM activities they’ll help with throughout the year.

Below, we meet Angelique. Hayley features in the Science article in this issue.

Angelique Vargheese

Hi! My name is Angelique Vargheese and I am beyond excited to be one of the STEM Leaders for 2023. The STEM subjects I am studying this year are Physics, Mathematical Methods and Data Analytics. My top 3 STEM moments at the College include:

• Creating a VR mansion for Innovative Solutions in Applied Computing. VR is an area we don’t get to study as coursework but during AOS3: Innovative Solutions, we got to focus on any area relevant to our task, whether it be VR or creating a website. It was such an amazing experience that allowed me to utilise my interests while exploring software we hadn’t used before. 
• Representing Kilbreda in the University of Melbourne’s SuperHack competition. This competition focused on encouraging female and non-binary students to get into engineering. In this competition, we were given three issues, all relating to home security and from there, we engineered a solution. It was amazing to experience engineering in such a hands-on way, and it was even more amazing when we placed second 🙂 
• Learning about life beyond our solar system for Unit 1&2 Physics for our research task. Astronomy has always been an interest of mine, even though it’s not a huge component of VCE Physics. However, this task allowed me to focus on this area and explain topics such as the Drake Equation, conditions necessary for life to form, the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, which was by far my favourite topic and definitely a topic you should look into!!

STEM is extremely important for our generation and the next, seeing as it holds so many answers for current issues. Though there’s been an increase in women in STEM, it’s still such a male-dominated industry and that’s why I believe it’s so important to inspire young women to participate in STEM. STEM helps us understand our world, and explains why so many different phenomena occur. 

My goal as a STEM Leader is to encourage the students at Kilbreda to pursue any STEM career that they are interested in, despite what others may say. Through my leadership, I hope to share my love for STEM in a way that motivates others to explore the various areas of STEM. 

Adrienne Donoghue
Learning Leader: Digital Technologies