St Columba’s Primary School, Ballarat is one of the first schools in Victoria to better support student engagement with the Digital Technologies curriculum by utilising a range of learning tools available for borrowing from the Computer Science Education Research Group (CSER), based at the University of Adelaide.

The CSER National Lending Library program, supported by the Australian Government Department of Education, provides schools with access to the latest equipment for the classroom.

In Term 1, St Columba’s worked with the ‘Kai’s Clan Kits’, a collaborative, all-in-one coding platform that encompasses several technologies including robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

Melissa Wood, Digital Education Leader and STEM Teacher at St Columba’s, said the Kai’s Clan Kit provided a dynamic and interactive platform with hands-on activities, enabling students to witness firsthand the exciting possibilities that STEM fields offer.

‘The kit was a user-friendly interface, and the lessons provided a diverse range of challenges, encouraging students of varying skill levels to participate and succeed, thus building their confidence and competence in these critical areas of STEM.

‘Our favourite lesson idea was the concept of students working towards gaining their L and P plates as they mastered new skills in coding a robot to move in different ways,’ Melissa said.’

The lending library program enables schools to integrate a huge range of exciting and motivating Digital Technologies educational equipment into the classroom and includes merge cubes, Virtuali-tee, Virtual Reality headsets, AR space kits and more.

Schools can request to borrow, for free, a selection of Digital Technologies educational equipment accompanied by lesson plans designed for different age groups and mapped to relevant content descriptors in the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies learning area.

Read more about the St Columba’s school experience here.