Systems & Information Technology __________________Page

from SJC Virtus Yearbook 2016

College Leadership _________________________Page

Systems and Information Technology continue to thrive at St Joseph’s College with many fantastic pieces of work being produced by students from the junior and senior schools. Boys continued to enjoy subjects that ranged from Multimedia to VCE Systems Engineering. Programming, automotive, robotics, electronics, 3D computer graphics and digital photography were other areas where students continued to build skills that will have them well placed to thrive in a world full of technology.

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. More than 20 students participated in the challenge. Ethan Near from Year 9 took out the Intermediate programming challenge with a perfect score! This was a great effort and he shows great promise of creating the next software solution that could one day change the world. This follows on from last year where he took out the beginner challenge. Well done Ethan!

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Students of VCE computing continue to achieve academic success with two classes undertaking the new Unit 3/4 “Informatics” subject. Year 10s enjoyed a range of exciting opportunities with elective subjects in Information Technology. A change to the “Computer Aided Design” subject had students designing, testing, 3D printing and racing CO2 powered cars. Students in “Bits and Bytes” took apart, reassembled and then networked desktop computers. They also had the challenge to “dissect” internal components and Multimedia students generated 3D animated worlds. Digital Stills students learnt how a digital camera works and how to operate the camera with manual settings. Students at Year 9 had the opportunity to participate in the “Game Design” challenge subject. They moved from gamer to designer and unleash their creative side to develop their own computer game. Year 8s that took “Surviving in an IT Age” developed their computational thinking and developed small education programs using Scratch and created their own website to educate an audience. As always the technology department look forward to the challenges presented by ever evolving technology in 2017 and the opportunity this gives the next generation to create new and exciting solutions to problems humanity faces.

- Christopher Jansen, IT Teacher SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

This year in the systems engineering area the students have again 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 Cameron Parke’s - Quad copter. Cameron spent many hours during holidays, before and after school designing and constructing his impressive machine. Denis Varju produced an impressive “linishing machine” and James Britt constructed a clay pigeon launcher, as well as these projects there were walking “spider” robots, a remote controlled security camera that you can access from your phone by Riley Raven and many more interesting projects that reflect the different interests of the students in systems engineering. 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.