Traffic Project Complete

The Year 5 GATE group entered their finished 'Traffic Project' in the Transpower Neighbourhood Engineers Awards and were awarded Highly Commended. This is a terrific achievement for this group as they worked very hard and came up with some brilliant solutions. They were also competing against students as old as Year 8.
The final plan involved a combination of three; security cameras, walking school bus and altering the drop off zone.
Smaller groups of students also worked with Year 6 students to put together 'Key Note' presentations on the entire process. One of these will be shown to the senior syndicate when the school is awarded the prize of $500.

Traffic Group Progress

The Year 5 GATE group has been working very hard to solve the traffic problems outside the front gate. We worked carefully through these steps:
1 Collecting data, which involved counting cars, talking to parents as they arrived, observing driver behaviour and surveying parents.
2. Collating the information to determine the main problem, which we decided was that too many parents were driving their children to school causing congestion and safety concerns at the front gate.
3. Thinking up possible solutions to solve the problem.
4. Rating the solutions against criteria to find the best ones.
5. Choosing three to work through in groups. (We chose 3 as we decided that no one solution would be enough and a combination of all three would be better).

The solutions we chose were: 1. To set up a new 'Walking School Bus' for the children who arrive at the front gate. 2. To install security cameras recording driver behaviour in the 'drive through'. 3. To remove the angle parking and turn this into a longer access road to the 'drive through'.

We have measured, charted, drawn, photographed, researched, e-mailed, interviewed, discussed, recorded and written heaps to work out how best to turn our solutions into a workable plan.

We are currently publishing everything and Mrs Waters is writing a report, to finalize the project.

Successful People

Our group has been looking at what people need to do to become successful. Our posters show some famous people who we feel have reached the highest level of success.

This is Tom with his poster about Bill Gates.

2008 Traffic Project

The Year 5 Gate group is working with an engineer to solve the problem Sunnybrae Normal School has with traffic at their front gate.During week 8 students observed some of the problems experienced and found that:

1. Parents were using the driveway to drop off their children.
2. There is construction going on at the school and pedestrians have to use the driveway as well.
3. Cars are coming into the driveway
and parking across the entrance to drop off their children.
4. Parent cars are then reversing into the main road traffic.
5. Cars are going through orange and red lights.
6. Pedestrians are not using the crossing.
7. There is a bus stop opposite the school and when buses are there cars use the median strip on the road.
8. Parents are using the shopping center carpark to deliver their children to school.
9. Parents are stopping on yellow lines to let their children out of the car.

GATE Year 4 2008

Hi!
We are a group of Year 4 students working on 'journeys' to success. In the Year 4 group, there is Jessy, Jazmin, Chloe, Ye Eun, Jordan, Ricky, Daniel, Tom and Rory. Our GATE teacher is Mrs. Waters. We are currently working on posters about a successful person and how they achieved their success.
We are working very hard.
We hope you like our blog!
By Ye Eun and Jazmin.

Graffiti Around the School

Hi our names are Emma and Callum. Our problem was graffiti. We did a brainstorm on who was affected, how we could solve it, where it is and what has already been done?

Next we made a list of challenges, problems, issues and concerns. Then we created a list of possible solutions and our best one was make a spray that cleans only graffiti off.

We came up with an action plan on what action will be taken and what is going to happen? Then we made a show about graffiti and how it happens, and we presented it to the group. We did really well on our presentation!!!

Our final bit was our PMI comments. One of our good things was when we told each other good ideas!!!

Strangers in School

Hi we are Abby and Weber.
We are trying to solve a problem about strangers coming into the school before and after school hours.
We came up with many possible solutions to the problem and we decided to make a strong wall with an animated ghost that pops up when someone is near.
We had to present our structure to the year 4 GATE group. We decided to make our structure out of Lego but the real thing will be made out of strong materials.