Last weekend, eleven students took part in a camp as part of the Gold Duke of Edinburgh International Award. This represented the largest number of students to ever take part in an Adventurous Journey at the highest level of the Award. The students comprised a mixture of Year 10, 11 and 12 students. The students who took part were Seeret Arora, Mitchell Chen, Rose D'Alisa, Ko Dejima, Matilda Grant, Naaz Kaur, Byron McNiven, Addison Selby, Ruvindu Siriwardana, Emelia Wedemeyer and John Ziukelis.

The venue of the camp was Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland. Students spent their days walking trails and tracks in around Binna Burra. They main task was to navigate their way through the dense rainforest environment, using specially prepared maps and compasses to guide them. In the evening on reaching their planned destination students set up tents and cooked a well-deserved meal.

As a practice camp, it was important that students learnt and developed their navigation skills and camping experience in preparation for their next Qualifying camp at a different location. They also had to take photographs and record their journey in notebooks in preparation for an Adventurous Journey exploration report documenting their experience and focusing on a specific aspect of their journey.

Head of Outdoor Education, Andrew Sole has seen a tremendous growth in interest in the Duke of Edinburgh International Award since he took over the running of the program 10 years ago. Last year around 60 students signed up for the award. The increased student participation and success of the award at A.B. Paterson College have seen a growth in the number of Bronze, Silver and Gold camps populating the busy College calendar.

Andrew Sole | Head of Outdoor Education