CSIRO STEM Professionals in Schools

The CSIRO STEM Professionals in Schools facilitates ongoing partnerships between teachers and STEM professionals to bring STEM subjects to life in Australian classrooms from Foundation to Year 12. ACEMS has been involved in the program since the Centre began in 2014 and each year our mathematicians reach more and more young students introducing them to the versatility and value of maths.

In 2018 ACEMS CI Tim Garoni, and AIs Ross McVinish and Stephen Woodcock took part in the program. Tim introduced year 5/6 students at Richmond Primary School in Melbourne to concepts in probability, by asking students 'how many football cards do you need to buy before you can have the full set'. Ross visited the Fig Tree Pocket School in Brisbane to work with year 5/6 students on mathematical games and juggling, and Stephen's partnership with St Scholastica's College in Sydney involved running workshops for Extension 1/2 students working towards their HSC. The program is an important part of nurturing and developing the next generation of STEM professionals and ACEMS is proud to be a part of it.

National Mathematics Summer School

The National Mathematics Summer School (NMSS) is a two-week live-in school that runs each January in Canberra.  The NMSS was established under the joint educational sponsorship of the Australian National University and the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers in 1969. Since then, over three thousand students have attended the summer school. Attracting approximately 75 final year secondary students each year, from all over the country, students are selected on their mathematical achievement and potential.

Each year ACEMS provides eight full scholarships and two half scholarships for students to attend. Students are awarded the scholarships on the basis of both merit and need, and are selected from a diverse range of schools and backgrounds. The students selected to receive the ACEMS Scholarships in 2018 were:

ALEX BLOGG, North Albany Senior High School, WA
ALEXANDRA CRABB, Wavell State High School, QLD
CALEB HUDSON, Salisbury High School, SA
KYLE MACASKILL, St Joseph's College Banora Point, NSW
SOPHIE MACDONALD∗, Hunter School of the Performing Arts, NSW
MARTHA REECE∗, Hunter School of the Performing Arts, NSW
NATHAN TRUONG, Patrician Brothers' College Fairfield, NSW
JACO VAN TONDER, Kadina High Campus (Rivers Secondary College), NSW
JESSE WRIGHT, Mount St Patrick College, NSW
GUOWEN ZHANG, St Joseph's College Gregory Terrace, QLD

The scholarships are aimed at diversifying the demographics of the school and to expose students who might not have had similar opportunities to mathematics beyond the school curriculum. ACEMS is proud to be able to be a part of the NMSS and providing advanced level mathematics to these aspiring students. More information on the school can be found at https://nmss.edu.au/

*half scholarship recipients

Big Data MOOC

From July to November 2018 the QUT node in partnership with Futurelearn, an online education platform, ran a series of four MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) on Big Data Analytics, repeating the success of previous years.

Learners were taught a wide range of subjects from decision making in data analytics to statistical and machine learning models, mathematical techniques for understanding big data-sets, and visualisation for further insight and communication of data.

The courses all performed well, attracting an average of 1864 active learners, which is almost 3 times higher than the median performance of Futurelearn courses over a similar period (August 2018 – August 2019). The courses also had higher retention rates than the Futurelearn median, with an average of 180 learners completing 90% or more of the course.

The series reached a wide audience of learners from different countries, including the United Kingdom (20%), India (9%), Australia (6%), the United States (5%), and China (3%). The series also attracted learners from a diverse range of ages and previous levels of educational attainment.

Graph Visualisation showing connections between a subset of webpages

Graph Visualisation showing connections between a subset of webpages