My class went to Murdoch University on 1 August, and we had an early start to get to the train station by 8:30. Unfortunately, I overshot how early I had to get up and ended up waiting 20 minutes in the car while listening to my mum reprimand me because I hadn’t brought an umbrella or a bag. While understandable, it was really painful to endure. After what felt like 12 agonizingly long years, it came around to 8:20. Ramming the door, I staged my escape, stumbling across the car park until finally reaching a safe area—the train station. I joined the rest of my class by the train entrance while we waited for one of our classmates, Ryley, who had decided to come so late that we missed the first train. Once all our students had finally arrived, we hopped on the train and had a nice, comfortable ride, all of which I spent standing up in the aisle of a train or the walkway of a bus. Why is public transport so crowded? After our long and cramped journey, we arrived at Murdoch!
Walking into Murdoch was probably the coolest sight because it’s this massive three-storey building made with a bunch of wood and other materials, but it’s just really architecturally nice to look at. Walking through, was kind of a letdown at first because, for the first minute or so, it kind of reminded me of an underground subway area you would see in movies—lots of concrete and some random yellow around the poles. But then we got to the steps and walked up the side of the building’s walls, and it was really cool. They had this giant random TV hanging there at the front (or back) of the building and another set of steps that curve into a circle and create a large seating area, which I guess is what the TV is for. Past the seating area was a long ramp that went all the way to the other parts of the campus, which was also really fun to walk down and up for some reason.
We arrived at Murdoch on the best day possible—Market Day! This basically meant there were a bunch of random stalls thrown about the campus where we could buy or get free stuff, like a Bible or enough free drinks to last a lifetime. They also had this awesome food area called the Student Hub that looked like a clean version of the food courts in shopping centres; it was full of food places. One thing I really wanted was the loaded fries; they had a picture of it, and it looked amazing. Unfortunately, the Student Hub was always full, and I didn’t have time or confidence to grab some. We did get to explore the campus a bit, though, and found some really cool things. It was still pretty early, so some things were still being set up, like a snowboarding simulator, which we really wanted to try but were under the impression it would cost money. We were told later that most of the stuff, including the snowboarding experience, was free; it was kind of painful to hear. One of the stalls we passed had five elderly people handing Bibles to people.
After a bit more exploring, we were rounded up and made our way across the campus and down the massive ramp to the lab. The lab, or at least the part we saw, was just two big tables with a bunch of animal skulls on the table and weird specimens in jars. We were told to put all our bags on the shelves and then were thoroughly debriefed on what not to do in the presence of dead animals. For example, don’t touch their teeth in case they bite us and gave us a deadly poison or something. We were also told that if any of the jars were wet, we should tell them. A few of us, understanding the severity of the situation, immediately started touching the teeth of all the skulls—it was very entertaining. Unfortunately, there was actually a point to being in the lab besides mauling dead animals. We were there to learn about food chains. After a quick introduction to food chains, we were each given a piece of paper with instructions to categorize as many animals as we could. Students really explored the specimens and completed the task. The work didn’t end there because each table then got a bunch of images of different animals and was told to organise them into a food chain.
The next activity was a nice walk back up to the big building out front where all the presentation rooms were. We got to spend a nice thirty minutes sitting in a chair listening to somebody talk about all the reasons and advantages of going to university. We found out how Big Picture is converted into a Selection Rank Score to get into Murdoch.
The excitement didn’t stop at lunch because we were given a tour of the theatres and each of its random little rooms – even our tour guides didn’t know about one of them.
The most important and best part of the day was coding! We were put back into a conference room and introduced to what we were going to be doing. It was pretty cool because it was coding, but instead of using coding to create applications, websites, or video games, we were coding these cool little robots called Sphero balls. Sphero balls are small plastic balls that contain the bulk of the robot, including a bunch of sensors, LED lights, and these amazing little cogs that stabilize the ball so that when it rolls forward, the cogs move, keeping the inside of the ball upright. We were given an iPad and introduced to how to program the Sphero balls. They have their own app that allows you to connect to them and use either chain coding or write the code. We had ten minutes just to play around with them. I spent most of those minutes adding a cool colour gradient onto the LEDs and found a noise block that allowed the Sphero ball to talk. Once we were familiar with the program, we moved to a circle on the floor where they laid down pieces of paper—some with fire images on them and others plain. The aim of the activity was to program the Sphero ball to move across as many pieces of paper as possible without touching the fire paper. Most people just used the drive mode on the iPad to manually drive it, however, I programmed it to move to each of the rectangles, then stop and declare that it had reached the rectangle before moving on. There was also a collision block, and I got it to work so that the Sphero ball would flash and repeatedly say it had collided with something if it did.
Overall, going to Murdoch turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than I had anticipated. Even the less exciting parts were interesting because I was in a new place with plenty to explore and do. The highlight for me was definitely the Sphero ball coding activity. It made the whole day worth it.
by Trent Heath