Raymond’s workshop entails old style learning. The knowledge he passes on is knowledge that he does not have a certificate for; it’s knowledge that has been passed down through oral history. The amount of knowledge Ray teaches in a session depends on the level of respect, as this knowledge needs to be earnt. Ray brings his own artefact kit with tools and weapons of our ancestors and talks about practices and protocols within Lore.
Raymond Timbery is a 26 year old Dharrawal Jaitmethang man connected to the South East Coast of Australia. He practises culture on a daily basis, and teaching culture is his passion and his purpose in life.
Music plays a major role in Indigenous Australian societies. As well as being a vital part of sacred ceremonies, it is also part of everyday life. Music is linked with a person’s ancestry and Country and is used throughout life as part of Indigenous oral traditions to teach what must be known about culture. Children, women and men of different ages have their own songs which are performed in specific contexts. Young children are encouraged to dance and sing about everyday events.
For Torres Strait Islander Peoples, the gorr/kulap (rattle) is an integral accompaniment and performance instrument used to perform traditional dances at social, cultural and sacred ceremonies. The gorr/kulap is made of seed pods strung together in the Torres Strait from the match-box bean. The bean grows in a pod, usually found in rain forested areas or could be washed up along the beach shore. The science understanding developed using this context is the particle and wave model of sound energy transfer.
Torres Webb is known for his work in promoting the power of positive relationships in educating future generations regardless of economic and social circumstance. Securing equity, inclusion and social justice for every person and child in today’s world requires an active partnership for learning across school and community, supporting and guiding educators to understand their purpose and role in new ways.
Gabrielle’s workshop is How Long is A Piece Of String? With a looped piece of string, you can weave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander String Finger Art Shapes, be introduced to our stellar worlds and create perfectly ancient circles and sacred geometrical artworks congruent with our anatomy, galactic mathematics and quantum physics principles. Welcome to The Art Of String Theory, bringing Dreamtime and Mathematics together through String Finger Art. String, Sticks and Ochre are still our greatest teachers of Culture and Mathematics. Come and See How.
Garbrielle Quakawoot has been a String Figure Artist all her life. She has played with this Art form with her grandmothers, great aunts, aunts, great uncles, uncles, cousins and other school children. While still in infant school, String Figure Art introduced Gabrielle to what is now known as Sacred Geometry. Following her artistic passion, Gabrielle has and is continuing to derive forms of Cultural Mathematics and more recently, Tribal Mathematics from String Figure Art.
Gabrielle Quakawoot has a Post Graduate Certificate in Natural, Cultural and Environmental Heritage Interpretation from the Institute of Koorie Education. She has also studied Indigenous Environment and Caring for Country II and III in the Mackay Area. Gabrielle’s’ matriarchal lineage is Byalli and lives her Dreaming now through her business, The Art Of String Theory.
Kargun Fogarty is an expert teacher of Aboriginal culture and knows the importance of this education for Aboriginal students. After listening to Prof. Chris Matthews talk about Maths as Storytelling, Kargun immediately saw the connection between maths and dance and used dance to teach mathematical concepts to Aboriginal students. Through the AECG STEM Camps, Kargun continues to develop the idea of maths and dance, which he now calls Corroboree Equations, as well as other STEM activities based in Aboriginal culture.
KARGUN FOGARTY or Moojidi (Sand Goanna) is a Man who identifies with the Mununjali Language group and the Guwamu Language group – with Connection to Jagera and Kutjela Language Groups. He has been practising and performing Traditional Song and Dance since he can remember. He has performed locally, nationally and internationally at places including Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, Italy and Ireland, performing at many events, festivals and groups. He has performed at literally hundreds, if not thousands, of schools in Australia. He is committed to the education and continuance of his Culture. He has worked as an Indigenous Education Support Officer and as a part of a Parent and Community Engagement team. He currently has around 80 – 100 Traditional Dance Students in different locations around South East Queensland.
Christian Maskey is an Indigenous man with family connections to adjacent areas of Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, and Ngarabal countries in regional NSW. Having struggled with education throughout his life, Christian is a savant with incredible abilities in the area of non-verbal perception (99th percentile) together with substantial difficulties with comprehension (4th percentile) and auditory memory. This has deeply motivated Christian to spearhead advocacy for improving the outcomes for students of all ages and a focus on abilities – to find out what students have a skill in that they enjoy, to hone it, and pursue a career that suits their style. With a particular focus on using traditional artworks, knowledges, and stories, Christian creatively weaves mathematics into culture in a way that instils curiosity and leads students to direct their own learning and engagement in mathematics.
Christian was a finalist in the 2019 Public Education Awards as part of a STEM Aboriginal Student Congress design team. He has worked with the Department for Education in South Australia for three years to boost South Australia’s education standards for our Indigenous youth and young leaders. He has also worked for CSIRO in the capacity as a mentor for select young Indigenous leaders from across Australia at the Aboriginal Summer School for Excellence in Technology and Science. Christian is in the early stages of authoring a book that infuses mathematical methods and specialist mathematics curriculum with aspects of Indigenous culture and systems.
Listen to ABC’s Walking Together series featuring the CSIRO ASSETS camp and Dreamtime Mathematics here: https://ab.co/2U0KKFZ.
If you’d like details about the curriculum targets for Christian’s workshops, or anything at all, please e-mail: christian_maskey@live.com.au
In Drones and Boomerangs we look at David Unaipon’s second most famous invention: the propeller.
We’ll see how it connects the Boomerang to the invention of the helicopter and students will get first hand experience with small drones on a couple of specially made test tracks.
Peter is a proud Wirangu man, and has a strong back ground in science. He has studied Astrophysics at the University of Adelaide, and is currently working on a degree in Video Game design at the University of South Australia.
n this hands-on maths activity, we first ask the big question: What is maths really all about? Solving equations, some people might say. Measuring stuff, say others. Those are certainly important aspects of maths, but fundamentally maths is all about finding patterns and rhythms and symmetries in the physical and living worlds and in data and numbers, and describing and classifying them precisely, and using this information make sense of and predictions about nature and the universe and design technologies. Now, our Indigenous ancestors have been reading and interpreting patterns in nature for thousands of years, so we can say they were the first mathematicians. To introduce students to this broader view of mathematics we discuss fractals, which are mathematical patterns of a special kind. Even if students think they know nothing at all about fractals, they actually already do because fractals are all around us. Each student will then make their very own, beautiful fractal shape to take home.
Associate Professor Rowena Ball is an applied mathematician and physical scientist at the Australian National University. Her grandmother’s people were Indigenous from central western Queensland. She obtained her BSc with first class honours and the University Medal in 1993 and her PhD in 1997. She has held several prestigious national and international research fellowships. Working with international collaborators, she uses mathematics to model problems in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. The results of her research are published as articles in international scientific journals. She has a particular interest in researching Indigenous sciences.
This workshop is a variant on the egg drop challenge with extreme restrictions design to force students into taking their time to really think about the design that they want to implement before executing on it. This teaches them how to solve problems with limited tools or under tight restrictions.
Edward Ah Kee is a director of the media agency Iscariot Media and an Information Systems student at the Queensland University of Technology. His work and education has mostly revolved around issue identification and picking holes in solutions.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Lands on which we work and live, and recognise their continuing connection to land, water and Community. We also pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
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