STEM Professionals in Schools Program

By Year 11 student Hussain Al-Ibrahim

On 9 August 2022, in conjunction with the “Stem Professionals in Schools Program”, engineering students from Charles Darwin University (CDU) came to the Year 11 C4E Mathematics class to provide students with an insight into possible engineering-related careers. The session started off with a powerpoint presentation which highlights what “engineering” is, providing the different courses available for graduating high school students, and the pre-requisites to enter certain courses.

This presentation was followed by an interactive task, which consisted of assembling a robotic arm and coding it to do certain tasks, such as picking up a sponge, etc. In doing this task, we were shown how the mathematics and physics concepts learnt in the classroom could be extended further to have applications in the real world. By working in groups of 5 or 6, we were able to collaboratively explore all the different ways to code the robotic arm to do a given task.

This visit from the engineering CDU students finished off with a brief presentation encompassing the importance of data science in Artificial Intelligence and engineering.

Overall, the visit was very insightful, opening our minds to possible engineer related career paths at CDU in the future.

The Year 11 C4E Mathematical Methods class would like to express our appreciation to Dr. Luis Herrera, Abhijith, Farida, Daniel, Showkat and Tracy for their generosity with their time in providing us with such an opportunity.