Systems & Information Technology __________________Page

from SJc Yearbook Virtus 2015

Valete __________________________________Pages

Systems and Information Technology continue to thrive at St Joseph’s with many fantastic pieces of work produced by students from junior and senior school. Boys continued to enjoy subjects that ranging from Computer Aided Design where they designed and 3D printed their products to VCE Systems Engineering where students produced products that ranged from quad copters to pin ball machines. Westcourt students participated in Enrichment subjects such as Game Design. Programming, automotive, robotics, electronics, 3D computer graphics and digital photography. Students continued to build skills that will have them well placed to thrive in a world full of technology.

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Once again students have displayed their innovation and creative skills in producing some excellent work. I think most boys in the class would agree that the stand out project this year is Rhys Hegyesi’s

“Fast and Furious” pinball machine. Rhys spent many hours during holidays, before and after school designing and constructing his impressive machine. Charles Francis was another student who displayed exceptional skills in producing his 3D printed Quad copter with a remote controlled gimbal for a “Gopro”, Charles was a very organised student who completed his project ahead of time, an achievement which any past systems engineering student will appreciate. As always there were successes and designs that didn’t quite meet expectations but this is the real life experience of a designer / engineer and I hope that all students in the class this year have gained an appreciation of the amount of planning and organization needed to complete a successful project.

NCSS CODING CHALLENGE

During term 3 the NCSS coding challenge was offered to students who had an interest in building their skills in programming and problem solving. This year Thomas Anderson from Year 8 took out the Intermediate programming challenge. This was quite an effort considering he was up against boys in senior year levels. Ethan Near from Year 8 was the winner of the beginner challenge.

Christopher Jansen

While participating in the NCSS beginners challenge I found learning, writing and experimenting with Python code a great tool and challenge to have fun with and use to complete everyday tasks, especially with the easy and interesting setup provided by the website, and hope to find other times when I can implement the skill. - Ethan Near, Year 8

GAME DESIGN

This year I was able to undertake game design as an elective subject. In game design the semester long project is to create your own fully functioning video game using the program ‘Game Maker’. ‘Game Maker’ gave us a lot of options for our games and what they would be like. We could have had a 2D platformer, a racing game, a shooter, a puzzle game or even something along the lines of ‘Pacman’. In ‘Game Maker’ we had to create our characters, the game world, and use coding or icons to control how our game acted. Through the two major research tasks completed during the semester we also learnt about the actual gaming industry and how it operates around the world. Game Design was a great subject to do this year.