On Wednesday 2 December some of our Year 8 STEM students and a few of the IT Angels leapt into the future exploring Power Automate solutions for the College. IT Angels are Homeroom representatives who have a strong interest in IT and support the College’s “Always Learning Anywhere Initiative”, both in and out of the classroom.
The group researched what paper based forms or processes the College wanted to digitise.
Mr Paul Reid, Director of Learning Technology, said Mercedes College was the first school worldwide to run this Hackathon and were fortunate to have engineers from Microsoft Education Worldwide to dial into the whole day from Seattle, Washington from 5pm until 10.30pm their time!
“After seeking feedback from the learning community the group worked on five different flows in Forms and Power Automate to deliver working solutions for our customers (staff and students).
“Students sat alongside staff as they designed and built the solutions, listening clearly to the needs of their customer”.
He said a Hackathon is an event where you identify real-world problems that affect you and your community. Students break out into small groups to tackle a worthwhile problem. By diagramming and exploring tools like Power Automate, students created “flows” to automate tasks to solve their chosen problem.
“Students get so engaged in this open-ended learning with potential real-world impact”.
Power Automate is Block Based programming. Some of the paper-based forms students endeavoured to automate including Catering Requests, Professional Learning Applications, Parking Bay requests and Fundraising requests. The College is looking forward to the students completing the task in 2021.
