An impressive three-storey masterplanned facility has officially opened at one of the Coast’s most prestigious schools.
The Infinity Centre at Matthew Flinders Anglican College will enable secondary students to work flexibly across a range of disciplines, including design and technologies, visual art, digital technologies and business.
It comes after the college was recently ranked in the top 20 primary and secondary schools in Queensland by Better Education, an independent specialist school website that rates the best performers across public and private schools.
Spaces in the new building include the Infinity Gallery, a ‘pitching room’, Infinity Studio and whitebox space, three co-labs, three art studios, two food laboratories and five design studios connected to design labs that contain equipment including 3D printers, laser cutters, sublimation printers and vinyl cutters.
The building also includes solar panels providing more than 146kW of power generation capacity. The college has one of the largest school solar installations across Australia with more than 1784 panels installed, bringing the total capacity across the campus to 642kW.
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College principal Michelle Carroll said the new facilities demonstrated outstanding architectural design and provided flexible spaces to support students to be agile learners.
“We’re planning for the future to prepare confident creators and problem-solvers of the future,” Ms Carroll said.
“These top-class facilities promote a dynamic learning environment and enable our students to become capable users of technology and resources while developing 21st century skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.
“With our expert teachers to challenge, guide and inspire them, our students are building the knowledge and skills to excel in tertiary education and the modern workforce.”
The Infinity Centre is the culminating project in the five-year Matthew Flinders Anglican College Masterplan, which has delivered a suite of modern learning facilities for its 1400 students.
Other projects at the Buderim college include the primary school’s new Wonderarium learning centre; the Flagship Centre for Years 5 and 6 students; and the new Year 7 precinct.
The first stage of the Infinity Centre construction commenced in 2022 and the project was completed on schedule in January, before being officially opened in May.
College captain Stephanie Ktenidis has Senior Food and Nutrition lessons in the new building.
“The Infinity Centre is an amazing learning space. We are also loving using it for meetings, to plan gallery exhibitions and even as a comfortable spot to chat at break times,” she said.
“The resources and technology are nothing short of state-of-the-art, although my personal favourite has to be our food laboratories. We use the food labs for recipe testing, product development, sensory evaluation and nutrition analysis.”
In the Better Education rankings, Flinders was the top-performing school on the Sunshine Coast, with its primary school at No.18 in Queensland’s top 150 primary schools. The secondary school was ranked at No.20, with both campuses achieving a ‘state overall score’ of 99 out of 100.
Ms Carroll said the rankings recognised the commitment staff at Flinders.
“Our experienced teaching staff work diligently to continually refine their expertise and knowledge to nurture a vibrant learning environment for all students,” she said.
“Flinders has a proud reputation for pursuing excellence and offering diverse learning and co-curricular opportunities to enable our students to grow into open-minded, compassionate and adaptable young people.”
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