The NCEA Year 11, 12 and 13 Digital Technologies students have been exploring the sustainable development Goal of how to make cities more sustainable and inclusive and we were really excited to hear from Brent Drummond who is a drone enthusiast. He is on the West Coast as a project manager with the Grey District Council and what started as a conversation about a drone club has now evolved into a project about replanting around the bridges and reservoirs. The Greymouth High School Digital Technologies Lab is managing the initial proposal, fundraising and the nursery management with different teams approaching various tasks from an agile scrum perspective. 

This year again the Digital Technologies programme has broken down the traditional classroom walls and the project is managed by me (Aleta Chowfin) as students function out of different learning spaces; some are in the classroom while others access the information remotely. We all meet together for a scrum (a stand up discussion) and track the project progress on Airtable and the Google Dashboard. We have started running a 2 week sprint and evaluate how we are doing against the product backlog we created during a brainstorm with the entire team.

It was great to have Brent come and join in for one of our scrums as the stakeholder from the Grey District Council as we plan to present the idea to the Mayor, Tania Gibson. Our focus for the session was to identify the key areas we will be focusing on for the next two weeks and we decided the promotional material and the fundraising perspectives are key for getting the starter project up and running. Matthew Mann and Joel Dumelow had some key insights to offer for the next stage as they design their moisture sensor rover using a Raspberry Pi and Max Kiely was able to recommend some ideas about setting up the nursery. This is definitely a space to watch as we start our horticultural project on setting up a nursery and distributing native plants. 

Aleta Chowfin
Digital Technologies Teacher