Teaching and Learning Report – May 28, 2015

May 19 College Assembly

Last week’s College Assembly provided us with the opportunity to acknowledge the efforts and excellence of two groups of Junior School boys.

We began by acknowledging the outstanding work of number of Year 8 students, who received a Headmaster’s Excellence Award for their work on the Year 8 Music Instrument Building assessment task. The following boys were recognised:

8B:

Jack Cameron

8D:

Mark Ritchie

Connor Shug

Gregory Sims

Lachlan Sultana

8F:

Lachlan Atkinson

Colby Baynes

Lachlan Brown

Matthew Duffy

Bobby Glanford

8H:

Luke Matthews

8J:

Hayden Irvin

Each boy constructed an outstanding home-made instrument, mostly made of recycled or everyday materials. The boys all enjoyed the challenge of researching, reinterpreting and building their chosen instrument. The boys’ teacher, Mr Murray, noted that each student produced a well-built instrument and presented a very high quality written reports to accompany their instrument. Well done boys!

The second group of boys acknowledged were a number of Year 7 students who, in the last week of term one, participated in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge. This was the first time that St Patrick’s boys have been involved in this Challenge. Bebras is an international initiative whose goal is to promote computational thinking for teachers and students and is aligned with the new Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum.

The Challenge consisted of 15 short-answer questions called -‘Bebras tasks’ which were delivered online. To solve the tasks, students were required to think in and about information, discrete structures, computation, data processing, and algorithmic concepts. They could choose to do it on their own or in groups of up to four.

Out of the 135 Years 7 and 9 students to participate from St Patrick’s, 15 boys were awarded with a High Distinction Certificate. This is a fantastic achievement given that computational thinking was a new concept to many of them.

The students being awarded High Distinction Certificates and an accompanying Headmaster’s Excellence Certificate were:

– 7A – Harry Johns, Jack Clinton and Flynn Hurley

7C – Nick Stevens, James McCahon, Felix McGurk and Henry Ross

7E – Mitchell Scobie and Joe Vivian-Fagan

7E – Dechlan Bailey, Riley Graham, Maxx Hofler and Kai O’Keefe

7I – Joel Harbour and Kyle Smith

Congratulations to each boy!

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