We’re Back!

Written by: Zoe Green

On Monday 1st and Tuesday 2nd February we began our first student facilitation, carrying out the Bees with Backpacks program with Sherbrooke Community School. It was great to hear the students’ innovative ideas, and how they used a mixture of Thymios and LittleBits within their bee friendly gardens. It was also interesting to see each team using different media for their promotional posters – a TV advert, a persuasive leaflet to farmers and a fashion collection to promote conversation of saving the bee population.

To finish the week, we had VCAL students from Upper Yarra Secondary College visit the tech school. We were all very excited about this as we had worked with these students remotely during 2020 to deliver our Bees with Backpacks program and discuss how they could further their new project – to create and construct an orchard for their school. We were very keen to hear about their progress since we had last met.

The purpose of the visit was to inspire and excite the students and show them the possibilities of how tech could be used to enhance their Orchard project. We began by giving the students a tour of the tech school showcasing the tech and specialised learning spaces available as a means of providing a taster so that students could begin to identify tech that they may want to use to further develop their orchard.

Following this, the students worked in small teams as part of our award winning Urban Farming Simulation program. It became very competitive and it was great to hear the students researching the different crops, questioning soil quality and strategizing how they could put measures in place to prepare for unexpected events such as extreme weather.  

The afternoon saw students working with our multimedia designer ‘Zorro’ who gave them an exciting demonstration of how she uses Adobe to generate creative designs and imparted valuable design tips and tricks that are used by Multimedia professionals. These skills will be important for students in the later stages of their VCAL projects.

Reflecting student requests the breaks during the day incorporated more discussion around our Artec Digital Scanners and how they could be used in a horticulture and land sciences area. While the students were practising these newly acquired multimedia skills, small groups took turns to use the Artec Leo 3D scanner to scan themselves. Once scanned, the images were able to be used in a variety of multimedia such as posters, games and to be 3D printed.

We will be working with this hard working and dedicated VCAL group from Upper Yarra throughout the year and we are excited to see how they use these new skills to enhance their Orchard.

After our first week back of facilitating we were left exhilarated, inspired and ready for a relaxing weekend to recuperate!