A school visit | Inspiring tomorrow’s surveyors
We’re on a mission to inspire tomorrow’s surveyors!
In a recent visit to Southern River College, our team conducted survey demonstrations with the year nine and ten students. Various survey technology were showcased, from drones to handheld laser scanners.
It was a great opportunity for the students to get some real hands-on experience with state-of-the-art survey equipment and ask our knowledgeable staff questions about the different types of surveying and the career opportunities available in the survey industry.
We’d like to thank the students and teachers for their participation and engagement during our visit to Southern River College.
The team provides several opportunities for students such as work experience, traineeships and future employment opportunities. Let us know if you'd like us to come to your school. We'd be happy to come and demonstrate what we do, talk about the industry and help educate the next generation of surveyors.
#surveying #geospatial #geospatialdata #surveycareer #landsurveys #traineeship #youtheducation #buildingthefuture
Video transcript:
My name is Shane Watson. I'm the mining and regional manager for Land Surveys here in Western Australia. At the moment we're seeing a shortage of surveyors across the industry. The main reason behind that is it's a career path that isn't well known or understood and it's just not presented to the students in the early years of their education as a career opportunity for them.
So Land Surveys going out to Southern River College is an opportunity for us to actually put back
a little bit into the community and demonstrate to the students what we do as surveyors. The kids never get an opportunity to actually see that.
My name's Jo Jenson and I work as the mining operations manager at Land Surveys. Well I used the Geo Slam handheld scanner for an example of equipment that we use in the survey industry. When I told them how much it cost, they didn't want to carry it. We're able to actually hold the scanner in our hand, and the internal measuring units in that scanner can detect while we're moving and where we're moving and survey reflectorlessly a whole bunch of distances at different angles as we move. And then it's the piecing of that all together that creates the true visualisation in the computer.
And it wasn't until we showed the students the output of the data from that piece of equipment that that we're really excited to be able to see their classrooms and their buildings in 3D model space. We did a scan of the library and they were pretty impressed with the results of that as well.
I'm John Long and I’m the chief remote pilot at Land Surveys. At the college I showcased our different types of drones that we have and then showed the kids how we use them for mapping and different types of measuring. Drones are used for aerial surveys and mapping predominantly.
I flew the school, I did it in two flights, half an hour, and basically was able to do a full 3D reconstruction or a point cloud of their school.
Then obviously we sat down and we were able to visualise and zoom in and out, and rotate around the whole school and is was great. Kids obviously were like, asking lots of questions, can you show me this classroom, that classroom and just getting them involved and using a 3D model that is easy for people to visualise and move around.
Everybody loves drones. Most people know someone who's got a drone or a family member who’s flown one they’re becoming quite popular now. So yeah, it was pretty cool to show them how we use them for work instead of for play.
The students definitely got an indication of the technology and opportunities that are out there in our career path for surveying, but also the teachers actually saw what we can do as well, which I'm sure will actually bring it more to the front with their future programs as well. It was actually really refreshing to see some of the students and the questions that they were actually putting forward to us. They were very intelligent questions and they were actually really engaged and interested in some of the stuff that we do.
The beauty with working with Land Surveys is that they are very inclusive, so they would really like to offer traineeships to students and then obviously they would support those students in progressing through their company.
Land Surveys, reaching out, bringing in that sort of equipment, putting on a demo like that for the kids. That's just great, especially to get some hands on sort of experience at the school stage
and look at some of that equipment. and just generally get excited about what some of their options are for after school. Hugely important for them and great opportunity that just might not have been around when we were at school.