27 May 2022
Two top performing Year 12 students travelled to Brisbane to take part in hands-on geography fieldwork.
Comet Bay College’s Justine Thomas and Amad Arzavi represented Western Australia at the Geography’s Big Week Out after achieving top results in the competitive Australian Geography Competition last year.
Joined by 14 other secondary students from across the country, Justin and Amad took part in fieldwork which investigated public spaces in central Brisbane.
Year 12 student Justine Thomas, with ATAR Geography teacher Sara Tyrrell, and Year 12 student Amad Arzavi.
Over the week they studied three different sites, the City Botanic Gardens, a central city square, and a pedestrian mall in a downtown area – using techniques such as mapping, surveying, estimating populations, and visualisation of data.
Amad Arzavi said he enjoyed meeting people from different states, sharing ideas and working together in the field.
“We met with representatives from the Queensland Government who taught us a lot about spatial technology and satellite imagery. To show us how it worked, they used the technology to determine the population of cows in a particular area. It was really interesting,” he said.
On the final day of the Big Week Out, students sat a test to decide which four participants will represent Australia at the 2022 International Geography Olympiad (iGeo), and Comet Bay College’s Justine Thomas was announced as one of the representatives.
She will travel to the Gold Coast in July and compete with her fellow Australian representatives in the virtual contest.
Justine said the Geography’s Big Week Out was an amazing experience and it was great to meet like-minded peers.
“I’m looking forward to the internationals to learn more about the connectedness of places. Geography is a such a relevant subject to study because it connects to so many other subjects and the world around us,” she said.