Mercy News

A year of Covid-19 imposed isolation was relaxed just in time to enable parents, staff and students along with distinguished guests to celebrate the fact that despite all, it has been a great year for our College.

While students were the centre of attention, the highlights of the night included staff choir, address by our Special Guest Speaker Mayor Greg Williamson, a highly entertaining student choir and Strings Ensemble, along with nervous College Captains delivering outstanding addresses. It was great to see our Federal Member for Dawson Mr George Christensen attending this special evening. Congratulations to all of our student awardees.

Special Awardees :

• The Long Tan Leadership & Teamwork Award - Natan Gooch
• The P & F Cathy Quinn Award - Grace Druery
• Mercy Award - Grace Brown & Brodie Hocking
• Christian Brothers Award - Jackson Ziekenheiner
• Indigenous Achievement Award - Eva Neilson
• Caltex All-Rounder Award - Logan Watt
• College Dux - Jann Carlo Macatangay & Imogen Bennett

Activate is an immersive, in-curriculum program designed to inspire and empower young people. The program sees students identify and explore problems that matter to them whilst using design thinking to ideate, develop and pitch their own innovative, scalable and sustainable enterprise solutions that make the world a better place. The Semester 1 Year 9 cohort of students developed and pitched a variety of inspiring and unique business solutions to some very mature social issues affecting the local and wider community.

Mercy College was well represented in the finals this year with not one but two teams making it to the pointy end of the competition! Congratulations to Peter Ford, Anna Zhang and Sophie Westcott.

An Office of Fair Trading initiative, students were invited to create an innovative and engaging way to generate buzz about consumer issues. They were asked to think outside the box and create a resource which unpacked the concept of opportunity cost and its relevance to consumers in the marketplace.

The following teams of students were awarded Certificates of Distinction, placing them in the top 15% of the state. Meghan Connolly, Isabella Sammut, Kassidy Refalo, Madeline Pace and Hayley Sullivan designed a board game with each space requiring the player to make a decision while James Galea and Thomas Jorgensen created an entertaining animation explaining the concept by referencing donuts – yum!

This Semester our Year 10 Methods classes extended their knowledge of graphs by graphing their names on a graphing program called Desmos. This will be a valuable skill next year at St Patrick's College. What we didn't expect was the amazing artwork that would be created. Keep in mind that every line and curve was created with an equation, graphed on a cartesian plane. These are just a small sample of the submissions.

As a culmination of the Year 10 Love of Literature classes Red Suitcase Project, we were invited by the residents of 17 Penn Street, Rob and Lynne Robson, to visit their property during our lesson on Monday afternoon, 9 November. This was the setting chosen for the class novel that we have written and it was a wonderful opportunity for us to see the house that we have been imagining our characters interacting with.

Each of us were commissioned to write a chapter for the novel using stimulus found inside a red suitcase. The chapters explored the lives of different characters who had at some time lived or visited the house at 17 Penn Street. The stories were then woven together through a modern-day protagonist who finds the suitcase and must uncover the links between the artefacts. We all worked with enough zeal to produce 12 full-length chapters, giving our novel almost 400 pages.

The novel is currently at the publishers and we will all receive our own copy once it is ready in a couple of weeks. We would like to thank the Mr and Mrs Robson for being so gracious in allowing us to visit their home and have the opportunity to, just for the afternoon, live vicariously in the environment of our characters.