Supporting the momentum of Barbreck’s STEM Program is Junior Engineers, who run school holiday programs within the Junior School for interested students. Junior Engineers, Mr Chris Halsall, provides a summary of the Junior Engineers holiday program and some exciting new term-based STEM Clubs occurring in 2022 below:

St Catherine’s Junior School opened its doors once again to the Toorak community, this time inviting children along to the School’s inaugural STEM school holiday program, facilitated by Junior Engineers.

Children aged between eight to 12 attended a mix of two and three-day coding and robotics camps throughout January, where they honed their STEM skills through digital platforms such as Minecraft Education, Micro:Bits, and Roblox.

Following the School Holiday program St Catherine’s launched an after-school Coding Club, exclusively run for the students of the Junior School. The program was aimed at students interested in learning how to create digital art, design and build games and learn all about the fundamentals of coding, all while having fun and making new friends.

The course has been running on Thursday afternoons from 3:35pm to 4:50pm and over the eight weeks the girls will learn how to build games from start to finish, create unique patterned designed, and tackle weekly projects that challenge their coding skills through the drop and drag block coding platform, Scratch.

Next term, St Catherine’s will be launching an App Prototyping Coding Club with Junior Engineers, with the intention of demonstrating how STEM extends beyond simply learning to code and build robots.

This program challenges the students to highlight real-world issues that exist around the globe and come up with an app-based solution to address it. Resources such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals create the foundation for thought provoking discussions amongst the group, and once they have highlighted an issue that resonates with them, they leap into action, designing and programming the app from the ground up.

The students will extend their basic coding skills, allowing them to program the app, as well as learning brand design, critical thinking, business principles and app development skills. The program demonstrates to the students just how far learning basic coding concepts can take you, whether you are trying to solve global issues, or express your creativity in the digital world.

Further details regarding school holiday programs and the Term 2 App Prototyping Club will be available via the mystcatherines parent portal in coming weeks.