At St Paul’s, we understand that the best way to instill a lifelong interest in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) is to provide a fun, engaging, and hands-on opportunity for students to explore and experience it for themselves.

In Year 5 student’s have the opportunity to participate in Vex Robotics and attend scrimmage days.

St Paul’s is committed to expanding its STEM opportunities from Kindergarten through to Year 6 over the next few years.

By its nature, the study of robotics inherently incorporates all four pillars of STEM. VEX IQ is a snap-together robotics system designed from the ground up to provide this opportunity to future engineers of all skill levels.

By packaging advanced concepts into an accessible package, the system also naturally encourages teamwork, problem-solving, and leadership for students and we see students as young as seven, quickly advancing in their coding, engineering and computational skills after just a few weeks.

As the world grows more technologically complex, computer science and computational thinking are becoming even more crucial fundamentals for students to learn. Since you can physically see the results of your coding exercises, robots offer a uniquely engaging format for learning these concepts.

VEX IQ Challenge

The VEX IQ Challenge serves as a great introduction to competition for primary students. Each year, students solve an engineering challenge presented in the form of a game.

Teams can participate in a variety of skill-based and judged events, like demonstrating a Programming Skills autonomous routine. The flagship Teamwork Challenge emphasises the value of collaboration over combat by pairing teams together to achieve the highest combined score possible.

Besides hands-on engineering expertise, a competitive environment instinctively instils other life skills like teamwork, perseverance, communication, collaboration, project management, and critical thinking.

St Paul’s has been successful in diocesan scrimmage events and received an invitation to attend Nationals in Adelaide in 2019. We placed equal second in the scrimmages and our two teams ranked third and sixth respectively in the overall rankings which was an amazing outcome for our school who had only just begun participating in VEX scrimmages.