The Cathedral College wins 2022 Science and Engineering Challenge at St Ursula’s

The Science and Engineering Challenge returned to Central Queensland this week, giving local high school students a taste of what a potential career in STEM could offer them. See which school was crowned the winner.

High school students from across Central Queensland have put their science skills to the test in this year’s Science and Engineering Challenge.

In total, 256 students from eight local high schools participated in this year’s SEC at St Ursula’s College in Yeppoon, participating in a number of different activities to give them inspiration for a potential career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

The program, founded by the University of Newcastle in 2000, has grown to involve more than 120 Rotary clubs and 30 universities, reaching more than 1000 schools and 35,000 people nationwide by 2019.

Team leader for the science and engineering challenge at the University of Newcastle, Adriana Zaja, said students participated in eight different activities which included building bridges and bionic hands.

“All the activities have a real world focus and are designed to have the students work as teams and foster that communication,” she said.

“It (SEC) is an annual STEM competition and it’s national, so that way the highest scoring team from Queensland will qualify for a national final at the end of the year.”

One of the activities students participated in was the bridge activity.

Teams designed and constructed model bridges to support a trolley carrying “gold” ingots across a gap in the tracks.

The activity was designed to help give students an understanding of physics and material properties to help transform materials such as cardboard, balsa and tape into bridges capable of carrying loads up to 200 times their weight.

Ms Zaja said there was a “massive demand” for STEM related careers.

“I think any opportunity to give students a taste of future careers, particularly in STEM as we know there’s a massive demand for STEM professionals particularly females,” she said.

“Any insight we can give students about where their skills, interests and passions may lie in STEM can really help them set them up to pick the enabling subjects in high school, such as maths and different sciences, and encourage them they can do STEM if that’s what they’re interested in and they can do it further education and trades.”

Students at The Cathedral College in Rockhampton were crowned the winners of this year’s Science and Engineering Challenge for the Rockhampton region.