Wavell SHS geography program undertook three major geospatial projects in 2023 working with the DEC Awards program, industry practitioners and the Jacobs Well Environmental Education Centre. Year 9 students designed a Rail Project to link current transport infrastructure to the proposed Olympic Village site in Brisbane including visiting the Cross River Rail Centre and engaging with A Class of Your Own (DEC Awards) to understand design concepts, Year 10 designed a peer-to-peer geospatial learning project for Nauru Secondary School engaging with a range of geospatial technologies and industry experts currently working in Nauru. Finally, Wavell's Year 12s examined land cover change of Koala habitat on the Northern Gold Coast with a student's project winning a highly commended for the 2023 Queensland Planning Institute of Australia Excellence Awards for Secondary Students.
Wavell SHS’s geography program has developed strong relationships with Class of Your Own, Cross River Rail, Aptella, Bennett + Bennett and Queensland’s Planning Institute of Australia with further partnerships in the pipeline. We are also in the CSIRO STEM Partnerships program which has connected us to a surveyor in Townsville and we are currently waiting to be connected with an Environmental Scientist. We've had a geospatial expert from the Northern Territory ‘zoom’ into our class to talk about using geospatial tools in remote areas thanks to SheMaps, we had Kate Fairlie ‘zoom’ into class to talk to our students about her work in Nauru. Our students interact with industry standard GIS Software, drones, 360 degree cameras, AR/VR and LIDAR scanners developing valuable industry skills and connections in the process. Wavell SHS geography students over the last ten years have gone on to study and work in urban and transport planning, epidemiology, landscape architecture and fire behaviour engineering. Geospatial skills in the Built Environment and Construction industries are in high demand.