STEM

The STEM program at St. Mary's Primary School runs as a specialist program for all students in Foundation to Year 6. It encourages critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and the use of digital technologies. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and our program integrates these four disciplines to help our students develop essential skills for the digital world they will enter in their future careers.

There is a strong focus on teamwork and the STEM design process to help students approach problems systematically and develop resilience when faced with challenges. Working in teams helps students develop communication and interpersonal skills. The STEM design process involves identifying problems, researching and brainstorming solutions, designing prototypes, testing and refining solutions, and communicating results. We focus on solving real world problems that allow students to actively engage in the design process through their individual creative input.

In lessons conducted in the DLC from Foundation to Year 6 we are utilising a range of cyber safety resources to reinforce the online safety message. A range of resources have been used sequentially from F-6 to ensure engaged learning takes place around the area of responsible cyber citizenship.

All students have individual user names, passwords and emails. This allows access to the school network as well as the internet. Attached to their Google Drive is individual folders that allows for the collation of their digital resources. These folders are shared with all classroom teachers, allowing teachers to have full access to students online work at all times. 

Login details and activity of the students are tracked by the school administrator ensuring a high level of security is maintained.

In 2017 we have begun to utilise the nRoll feature from the nForma suite which allows classroom teachers to record the attendance roll electronically. This attendance data is sent to the office daily and collated automatically for inclusion in the June and December reports. This program also allows for the collation of CEM required data in a very simple manner. There is an App on staff iPads to help make this process even simpler.

Online Parent/Teacher interview booking continued through the use of our online provision.

The wifi capability of the school has been expanded in the last 12 months.

Future directions include:

Critical evaluation of educational applications by teaching staff continues, ensuring quality software purchases for student learning and engagement.