SCIENCE

Whilst our Year 12 students have finished their classes and Year 11 classes are now revising for exams, our junior students are in full swing designing and undertaking experiments; and communicating the results of their student led investigations.  

In Year 8 Science students have finished their Energy transferring and transformations topic, including the CAT for which they were seen in the schoolyard completing the ‘Snappy bands’ part of the CAT which involved shooting rubber bands with rulers to measure the effect of increasing potential elastic energy (stretch) on the transformation into kinetic energy (distance travelled)  or burning Cheezels to measure the amount of energy released. 

They are currently in various stages of the process of completing their research and experiments as are the Year 9 Core Science students (who recently completed the topic of electricity) and the Year 7 science students will begin their investigations shortly, after completing their ecosystems unit, in which they have learnt about food webs, invasive species and human impacts. The students researched a specific ecosystem, the interactions between species, the human impacts on the ecosystem and ways to reduce those impacts and are presenting that information as a community announcement.  

Year 9 Sustainability are working through the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They are specifically focusing on Goal 10: reducing inequalities in society and the students will do presentations about their chosen inequality.  

Both Year 9 and Year 10 Forensics classes have been researching different aspects of toxicology and working as CSIs the students solved a poisoning case and identified mystery powders.  

Year 10 Physics students are busily working on building their Rube Goldberg machines. ‘Who is rube Goldberg?’ and ‘What is a Rube Goldberg machine?’, I hear you ask. Rube Goldberg was an artist, author, engineer and inventor. He is famous for his comic strips of Rube Goldberg machine, with the machines designed to overcomplicate a simple task, through a series complicated contraptions. The students are using the same concept to build over complicated marble runs, using their knowledge of forces and simple machines.

Melinda Lori Pui

SCIENCE KEY LEARNING HEAD