STEM at Junior School
Junior School STEAM Festival
During Term 2 in Junior School, our focus was on STEM which culminated in our inaugural STEAM Festival on the last day of term.
As part of this, the girls spent their House time, a time dedicated to building our sense of community of kindness and sisterhood, designing, building and coding a House robot to compete in our Inter-House Robotics Competition. The girls also used their House time designing and making props and backdrops using Minecraft for our Junior School production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Finals of the Robotics Competition and the performance of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were both performed at the end of the STEAM Festival, the perfect bookend to a day dedicated to creativity in STEAM.
Super women in STEM
At Pymble, we are determined to close the gender gap in STEM pathways for our girls and their futures. We know that our girls need to be competent in many different skills to ensure they can strive confidently towards their dreams in their adventures at school and in their journeys beyond school.
Here is a short video, The Dream Gap, which resonates deeply with me as I think about our girls and their futures. I am deeply proud of the journey we are already on with our girls, and I am grateful for the support of our parent community in fostering a mindset in our girls of dreaming big and believing in themselves. Please click on this link to watch the video.
The video emphasises how important it is for our young girls to have role models to look up to so our girls know they can realise their full potential, just like the strong female role models they know and love. All the mums, aunts, grandmas at Pymble are phenomenal role models and as part of our ongoing STEM focus I look forward to celebrating the Stem Superwomen, the many entrepreneurs in our community who work in technology, finance, product design, architecture, software design and engineering.
I am so proud of the many different opportunities our Junior School girls have at Pymble to build the mindset they need. Below is a snapshot of the many examples of STEM learning our girls enjoyed last term:
Kindergarten – learnt about push and pull forces and have studied the movement of billycarts. They are also very excited to have a construction play space set up in their common area supervised by Gerald the Giraffe!
Year 1 – thought about the differences between day and night and learned to collate data which they will later use to inform a prototype design. They also developed algorithmic thinking through the instructions they followed as they learned to code using Scratch and build LEGO robots.
Year 2 – collected and analysed data on wind speed, wind direction and rainfall, so they loved our very soggy weather in June!
Year 3 – developed their algorithmic thinking using LEGO Spike and Turing Tumbles.
Year 4 – explored heat conduction and investigated how light bends and the energy generated by turbines and solar charged cars.
Year 5 – continued their Mission to Mars including rocket designs and designed equipment to ensure the safe landing of their rover. They honed their coding skills to automate the rover to safely navigate the terrain of Mars. As our continued focus on sustainable practices, the girls also investigated processes to maintain life on the journey to Mars and whilst on Mars.
Year 6 – investigated sustainable agriculture practices. They have now met their learning partner, our Pymble designed Chatbot, Maisy Meadow Mouse, who will help as the girls shape their questions and wonderings over the year.
I look forward to meeting you soon.
