Magazine 2017

We were extremely proud when Parklands College was recognised as an Apple Distinguished School (ADS) for innovation, leadership and excellence in education in November 2016. Such success can be attributed to our Apple One2One programme which has provided the platform to engage in authentic learning experiences through cross-curricular project and challenge based learning. Project based learning has been instrumental in equipping our learners with the relevant and necessary skills for the modern workplace. We have found our learners to be intrinsically motivated when they are solving or addressing a real world challenge and creating a product for an authentic audience, thus developing a deeper sense of purpose or passion for their learning. PROJECT BASED LEARNING LEGO Robotics also provides two international project based platforms that we encourage our children to participate in, namely the World Robot Olympiad and the First Lego League. These competitions require learners to solve problems based on a real world theme or challenge set by the respective hosting country each year. Two of our Robotics teams represented South Africa at the World Robot Olympiad in India last year, themed “RAP THE SCRAP”. Team Robodog placed 12th in the world, the highest accolade a South African team has received for the Regular category, whilst Team Infinity placed 15th for their oceanic plastic waste collection boat. Such challenges provide our learners with a purpose driven approach, and inspires research and creative ideas to solve real world problems. WORLD ROBOT OLYMPIAD We have also extended our curriculum to include experiential learning courses such as Film, Sound Engineering, Animation, Robotics, Mobile Application Development and Hospitality. These provide our learners with opportunities to explore areas of interest and to develop global competencies and horizontal skills for cross-curricular application and response to real world problems. EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING 8 Parklands College, Twentieth Edition, 2017