News & Events

St Paul’s College is doing it’s part to advance South Australia as a leader in space technologies. Our Year 7 classes were thrilled that their video entry won them a place in the Seeds in Space program.  Our wattle seeds are currently orbiting the earth on the International Space Station and we can’t wait for them to return to Earth in May.

We also were successful in winning a grant to compete in the Space STEM Challenge.  We will work with former astronauts and the Houston Space Centre to complete weekly STEM challenges and compete against students from around the world!

The Paladins of St Paul’s have been busy in the holidays!  We competed in the Australian Tech Challenge on December 12th.  With Covid -19 restrictions, we had to complete our judging interviews via Zoom.  It was wonderful to reflect on all the outreach we completed in 2020 and the judges were extremely impressed with the progress made by a rookie team.

Our robot, Joyeuse performed brilliantly, gaining maximum points in autonomous and shooting rings accurately into the middle goal. 

At the end of December, the team were hosts for a segment of the 24Hours of STEM, an international collaborative with guest speakers presenting continuously across 4 live streams. You can watch the sessions at https://www.24hoursofstem.org/.  Our sessions included presentations from Christina Rohlf, from UC Davis discussing Musculokeletal Biomechanics, Garry Law with Designing FLL Challenges with FUN in mind! and a though provoking exploration of innovating Waste Solutions in Uganda with engineering student, Paige Balcom from Takataka Plastics. 

January saw the team competing again, this time internationally in the International Student Robotics Challenge, based in London.  Our team, led by Captain Caleb Rodgers, met at school to program a virtual robot to complete a series of challenges.  Our code was uploaded and used in a virtual arena in a race against our opponent to claim a series of towers by sending a signal when in close proximity. 

The Paladins had a 4 – 2 win loss record and finished in 12th place.  We are currently gearing up for Round 2 as we strive to reach the finals in May.