Four Ashburton College students are currently working with mentors from Microsoft to complete a digital project.

Anthony Gola, Zane Cameron, Jordan Green and Tayla Wikitera have been selected to complete a project with guidance from mentors who work for Microsoft, and live in the United States, headed up by Beartice Mendez from the Nueva Foundation. They offer coding workshops that provide hands on opportunities for students to learn real-world problem solving skills using coding, hardware and their own imagination.

 This screenshot shows our team in one of the video conference meetings that occur fortnightly throughout the project. This opportunity has come from our school’s membership of NetNZ in collaboration with Renea Mackie and her Wellington business, Creative Forest. Renea has been supporting these students in a project based learning environment over the past year.

This team are working on an improved version of the Mihi pai system that is currently used to reward our students for behaviour that supports the Ashcoll values. They have had to  pitch ideas, carry out research, assign roles, create and discuss ideas and document their progress on a shared drive. They are working with a range of online tools to complete communication plans, develop marketing strategies and videos, create graphics and logos , design databases, and create  a website and an app.

By Anne Williams