Golden Key Mentoring Project - Zhibang Cheng & Harry Ralph

By Shona Mckenzie | Posted: Thursday June 24, 2021

A few weeks ago, I attended Golden Key Mentoring with a group of Casebrook students.

We got into groups and were placed with students from the University of Canterbury who became our mentors. These mentors helped us to complete a project of interest, to display on the campus of the University. After we got to know each other we began to plan our project. As my mentor, Sam was studying engineering, we decided to build something using the blueprints that Sam will create. We met once a week to plan, build and decorate our projects. Sam brought some tools and materials to start building our project. Our group decided that we would build a bridge that combined with the shaking table, would simulate an earthquake.

Every week we made progress in building our project as well as growing our friendship and teamwork. After five weeks of hard work, our project was finally complete. On Tuesday in week six, we took our finished project to the University of Canterbury. Our project was a huge success, everyone crowded around our bridge which we modelled from the Golden Gate Bridge. Accompanied by the shaking table, it looked like the perfect model of an earthquake. To conclude the programme, everyone got awarded a certificate by the organisers.

In my opinion, I feel that this programme had many benefits that educated you in teamwork, leadership skills, and the subject you are interested in. I would like to do this program again if I had another chance.

By Zhibang Cheng

Room 5

Earthquakes - Harry Ralph 

At the start of term two, I attended a mentoring program called Golden Key. It was a six-week-long course and we had to make a project to show our progress.

Initially, we had a lot of disagreements around our project topic, but we eventually settled on the subject of earthquakes.

The next few weeks our group got to work. We started creating a pyramid out of spaghetti and marshmallows. Our mentor wanted us to build the structure out of spaghetti and marshmallows because he was trying to teach us about saving resources. We were running out of time though so we started creating a poster instead. Each person had a specific task to research and mine was the causes and effects of earthquakes. I wrote a couple of paragraphs, got two pictures from the internet, and made a graph using a Google spreadsheet. Before I knew it, there was only one week left until presentation day. In the final lesson, everyone had done their research so we continued making the spaghetti pyramid. We somehow managed to finish it before the event.

When we were at the University we all set up our stuff and the presentation started. It was pretty much a Science Fair where you could walk around the room and look at other people’s designs. Some of the designs were pretty unique. Some people just used a poster, some people just used structures. However, our group did a mix of posters and structures.

The Golden Key Mentoring Program was very good and I would like to do that again someday. We all got a certificate at the end for our hard work and learning.

By Harry Ralph

Room 5