The Goonawarra Primary School’s Goonawarra Gearheads have been competing state-wide this year.
The students have recently competed in the nationals south First Lego League National Championships, after scoring second at the regional competition.
As part of the project, STEM educator Sean Sherlock said the students researched their own topic for the competition’s innovation project under the unearthed theme.
“They emailed many people from Melbourne University and they managed to get two people that were really interested in potentially giving us some feedback,” he said. “They suggested an option which was pseudo archeology, which we had no idea about.
“The kids went through and did a bit of research and they developed all these posters.”
Grade 6 students Leela and Kim explained the concept.
“Pseudo archaeology is fake archaeology that’s like myths and made up lies,” Kim said. “And usually the people who make these made up lies they want to profit off of it.
Leah added, “some people believe that the pyramids were built by aliens or the gods … but real archaeologists found a way to prove that it wasn’t.”
The students completed an informative video as well to teach people about the subject, and created a checklist for students and teachers to go through to discover if something was based on credible sources.
Mr Sherlock said the grade 5-6s were the ones to compete in the competition, with all students in the club training twice a week for 40 minutes of their lunchtime.
He said he was proud of how the students went in the competition and throughout the year.
“It was pretty intense, but they did really well, they had growth in every area,” he said.
