‘Look at the splendour of your skies, your creative genius glowing in the heavens. When I gaze at your moon and your stars, mounted like jewels in their settings, I know you are the fascinating artist who fashioned it all!’ – Psalm 8:3
I am delighted to share some photos of the building and share our purpose of learning for our students here at DCS. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics but it is not simply these subjects taught separately. Instead, these are woven together and built on, to form the processors, principles and systems that all of us use within our own work.
Teaching our students STEM allows them to prepare for their future by using thinking, seeking, finding, problem-solving, collaborating, discovering and presenting skills. These ways of learning will help build the future.
Recently our Head of Teaching Learning and Curriculum, Katrina McNab, shared this with me:
STEM is a vehicle that can take students on the journey to discover their gifts and talents, and develop the attributes that we, as a Christian school, have identified as being important. The knowledge, skills, understandings and attributes that we want our students to leave our school with include, but are not limited to, understanding they are loved by their community and by God, being able to problem-solve, collaborate, work co-operatively as a team, respect the opinions of others, empathise, critically analyse information, problems and solutions, take risks and develop confidence. We want them to understand God’s story and use this to be world contributors and change-makers in big and small ways, not just when they grow up into adults but right here and right now. STEM can help facilitate all of this in fun and engaging ways.
At DCS our first value is to be Christ-Centered. It means that even when considering naming programs we want to have Jesus central. Revelation 22:13 speaks about Jesus, ‘‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.’ This brought us to think on the word ‘Alpha’ as the central element of Jesus. As we explored the meaning of the name Alpha, we also unveiled a coding and strong science, engineering and mathematical link. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of modern languages and is derived from the Phoenician alphabet. Like the other Greek letters, alpha is commonly used in chemistry, engineering, physics, mathematics, and science – STEM. Etymologically, alpha came from aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), meaning “ox” in Phoenician. The uppercase letter alpha is A and the lowercase letter alpha is α. In the Greek numeral system, the letter was taken as the symbol of 1 (one). It presents the first/the beginning. This lead us to define our STEM Centre as a space to LAUNCH learning, the beginning of discovery of His world – centred around Jesus being the beginning and the end, the first and last.
I wish to announce to our DCS Community our newest learning precinct:
ALPHA HQ (Alpha Headquarters) – DCS STEM Centre
