Announcements

Our Year 10 Engineering students began their aerospace engineering course this year looking at the history of human space flight and exploration.  As part of this topic each student undertook research on a space mission of their choice, and produced a popular science-style article about that mission.

This week, Samantha Trafford writes about the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

Hi everyone,

Your friendly neighbourhood Sustainability Officer here with an exciting energy update …

So far this year, we have reduced our energy consumption by 10%!

This may sound small, but it’s a massive achievement. To put it into perspective, we’ve saved 18, 867 kWh, enough to power three typical 4-person houses in Ainslie for a year.

Thank you to everyone who has been Flicking the Switch and encouraging their students to do so. Your combined efforts have produced a real, tangible change – so well done 

As a community, we have been considering the merits of International Baccalaureate (IB) programs in the Merici context since 2016.  Our early investigations found a high level of alignment between the existing Merici Mission and Vision Statement and Principles of Powerful Learning and the IB Mission statement and IB Learner Profiles. The IB’s focus on inquiry learning also reflected Merici’s pedagogical approach to teaching and learning, while providing additional teaching resources and research-based support underpinning the programs.

Merici College fielded two teams in the ACT Titration Stakes on Tuesday evening.  In a competition valuing technical skill and precision, teams must determine the concentration of a solution of sodium hydroxide and then use this to further determine the concentrations of three separate solutions of acetic acid.

In 2017, with the support of the school leadership, I applied to participate in the Australia-ASEAN BRIDGE School Partnership Program. I am very fortunate to be selected to be part of this program.

Recently I had the opportunity to travel to the Western Front during the school holidays on a commemorative tour for World War 1. I was given this great privilege through my entering and winning of the Simpson Prize, a national competition for Year 9 and 10 students, designed to explore the significance of the first world war for Australia and Australians both past and present.

Today is National Simultaneous Storytime, an event organised by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) where many libraries and schools across Australia and New Zealand read a story together as part of the Library and Information Week celebrations. 

On 7 March 2018, twelve senior students participated in our very first Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzClo). OzClo is contest for high school students that combines computational thinking and linguistics, challenging them to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages. We are very pleased that Merici was able to field three teams of Year 11 and 12 students in this year’s competition.