Western Port
Western Port
Divine inspiration
14 March 2017
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Robots give students Earthly insights
Nitty, gritty: Western Port Secondary College students Tainui, Jake and Crystal with their earthquake machine. Pictures: Gary Sissons
WESTERN Port Secondary College students brought out their earthquake simulators at last week’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) graduation ceremony. The students used Lego EV3 Mindstorm robots to answwer the question: “How can a robot help us understand the Earth’s surface”. The school received philanthropic funding to buy the robotics kits for the program. “The students designed and built their own earthquake simulators and miniature houses to test the stability and structure of their houses,” course coordinator Chris Quinn said. Also on Tuesday, Tyabb Railway Station Primary School’s STEM program ended with the graduation of 33 grades five and six pupils. Mr Quinn said the primary STEM program helped strengthen the network of schools to improve educational outcomes for pupils. Western Port Secondary College was selected by the Education Department as a STEM catalyst school with two staff gaining their diploma in STEM education at Deakin University. The STEM centre is running the school’s years seven and eight STEM programs. “This Primary STEM initiative is future-proofing the employment opportunities for young people in our community,” Mr Quinn said. “Seventy-five per cent of the fastest growing occupations now require STEM skills and knowledge and, over the next 20 years, 44 per cent of Australian jobs are at risk of automation and computation.”
Hastings costliest port option Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au THE latest “discussion paper” released by Infrastructure Victoria estimates building a container port at Hastings will cost more than double that of developing a new port at Bay West, inside Port Phillip. Using scenarios based on ships capable of carrying either 14,000 TEU (based on 20 foot long containers) or
18,500 TEU, the paper puts the cost of developing Hastings to handle nine million TEU a year brought in by the smaller vessels at $12.8 billion; building Bay West for the same number of containers is $6.14 billion. When the larger ships are taken into account, costs at Hastings go to $12.9 billion as opposed to $6.4 billion at Bay West. Taken to their ultimate third stage of development, a container port at Bay
West would require close to 30 million cubic metres of dredging and 47 million cubic metres for Hastings. The Bay West proposal near Werribee involves using dredged material to build an “island”. Material dredged from Western Port would have to be dumped 50 kilometres offshore in Bass Strait, with 18 million cubic metres of suitable sand then being brought back from the same area for reclamation works.
The 30 kilometres of shipping channels into Western Port will need 2.6 million cubic metres of dredging to accommodate the larger ships (18,500 TEU), but the actual port area will require a further 21.6 million cubic metres of dredging. The Bay West/Hastings comparison is designed to help the state government choose one of the two sites for the state’s next container port. Infrastructure Victoria states that
while it might be “technically possible” to increase capacity at the Port of Melbourne “by four or five times” it is also working towards finding a “tipping point” as to “when it may be more practical to create additional port capacity at a second container port”. As it edges closer to recommending either Hastings or Bay West as the site for a second container port, Infrastructure Victoria has ruled out Geelong or Portland. Continued Page 4
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