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Wesley team travels to the year 2065
It’s not often when someone asks you what you did in the holidays you can say ‘Oh, some of the Wesley guys and I travelled to 2065 and designed a space settlement...’
Over three days in January a small team of students from Glen Waverley took part in the Australian Space Science Design Competition (ASSDC) finals. They were the only Victorian school to get there (albeit virtually). Roger Lu, Jerry Lin, Curtis Chan, Insbruck Ong, Tom Avent, Ian Ji and Numa Lemoh (OW2020) formed part of a futuristic aeronautical engineering company set in the year 2065. Wesley College was paired with Caroline Chisholm College, Perth Modern School and Corinda State High School to form Team Borealis.
The group showed great skills in communicating, collaborating and negotiating with their colleagues to respond to a Request For Tender (RFT) to design a space settlement set in a fictional solar environment, which humans are beginning to colonise. After forming their engineering organisation, teams were tasked with producing a tender response of up to 50 pages which detailed how their design meets the requirements established in the RFT. Their leadership and ability to respond to the challenges of communicating remotely across three different time zones was impressive. Clearly our students had gained many skills from the challenges of learning remotely for much of 2020, as their abilities and respect for others when communicating online were something to behold. While our students did not come away with the big prize, they can feel very proud of their efforts in making it to the finals.
Reflecting on the program Tom said, ‘Doing the ASSDC wasn’t only fun from a technical standpoint, but from a collaborative standpoint. The competition wasn’t just about how good you were at Design or Science but how well you could work with others in a team environment when designing something together. It gave the impression that this is what it would be like actually working in industry with a team, which I hadn’t really got a chance to experience before’.