Ōtākou Steam Cluster

After four years the Ōtākou Steam Cluster has come to an end.

Over the past four years, the Ōtākou Steam Cluster has been working on STEAM-based learning alongside facilitator Iain Cook-Bonney.

Cluster schools have been enriched with resource kits, professional learning, and creating connections with experts in their fields, such as the team from NASA during the Mars Project, and Sir Iain Taylor during the Kaitiaki Projects. 

In 2020 the students focused on the 2040 project. This saw the children investigating and creating their solutions to six issues and what these issues might look like in 20 years time.

In 2021 the students focused on Mission to Mars. They honed their digital skills during this project as they worked on Minecraft, Scratch, digital poster making, and programming a variety of robots. Students were invited to zoom meetings to talk to experts from NASA. All the Year 7's took part in the Wonder Project launching bottle rockets.

In 2022 the students were focusing on Kaitiaki, being guardians, out students looked at the local lens of Dunedin history and build models and virtual worlds to showcase and share the history and the knowledge.

Each year there was an exhibition held at the Otago Polytech HUB to share the work from around the clusters. During the final cluster celebrations, three of our projects won prizes. These are on display in the school foyer. 

We would like to thank Mr Cook-Bonney for all his dedication to the cluster of over the past four years and we wish him well in the future.