24 Jul 2018
Article by Emma Rutledge, Year 9
On Thursday the Fifth of July, ten students from 9 English 1 made the courageous act of visiting the University of Newcastle on King Street with Miss Golding to attend the Ideas Collider Excursion. Our group of six girls and four boys attended the exciting expedition to experience a new and unfamiliar learning environment that was out of all of our comfort zones. The event made us collectively become more open minded to situations that we may have never thought of participating in. Our school (Kurri Kurri High School) was one of the five participating schools; West Wallsend, Newcastle, Kotara and Merewether High School. We left our school at 9 am and upon arrival, we entered the New Space Building and were spoken to by the coordinator, she explained what was happening and informed us of the itinerary. After her speech we were divided into ten groups of five students (each one from a different school) not knowing any of the other children. We were given one hour to solve the real-life problem of artificial intelligence going ‘evil.' We then had to introduce ourselves and present our issue solving product to two judges; a PhD student and an entrepreneur who decided on the most sophisticated concepts. All of us walked away very happy and content, feeling successful and pleased with our efforts to cohesively work with a group of strangers. Fortunately, there were three prizes for first to third places and three articulate students (Riley Jones, Ellen Chenery and Taylah Aspinall) from our class were in the three winning groups. Overall, the event was very eye opening to new opportunities and careers paths such as entrepreneurship that we could potentially take up after leaving school. We all had a fantastic time and would certainly go again to solve more future focused, real world problems.