Victoria’s first Big Day In Junior was held in Melbourne on Wednesday 15th November at Bentleigh West Primary School. This involved 100s of Year 5 & 6 students and teachers from Bentleigh West and surrounding schools spending the day doing workshop activities with industry representatives from a range of STEM and STEAM areas.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. STEAM adds Arts into STEM, some argue a fundamental addition.

One of the activities the students rotated through was making lights for 3rd world countries through the SolarBuddy project. SolarBuddy is a charity aimed at ending the cycle of energy poverty that affects many communities across the globe. They run programs for Australian children focused on energy poverty, renewable energy and global citizenship.

Joel Aarons (Adobe Education Leader & Media Arts teacher at Bentleigh West PS) ran a series of design sessions with iPads based on the use of the free Adobe Sketch app. Joel’s main message is that anyone can draw and be creative with drawing when shown how and provided with a template to use.

The F1in School program is always a highlight of these events. The students enjoy testing their reaction skills and learning how F1 racing producing so many technical innovations.

Other workshops and activities were provided by the following IT representatives …

• CSIRO
• Westpac
• TechnologyOne
• WiseTech Global
• TATA Consultancy Services
• Microsoft
• UTS
• Animal Logic
• Atlassian
• Maker’s Empire
• Apple
• Adobe
• The Formula 1 STEM Challenge
• SolarBuddy.org
• Code Club

The Big Day In Junior is a great example of how industry and education can work really well together to help engage and inspire students. Stay tuned for an update of the Brisbane & Sydney version as well as some videos from these days coming soon to https://vimeo.com/createedu