STEM learning for schools
STEM and cyber safety programs for Australian schools
Fast Emu engineers run curriculum-aligned STEM and cyber-safety programs for primary and secondary students in Years 3–12 — practical, age-appropriate, and delivered by people who do the work every day.
Programs
Choose the right fit for your students
Programs can be delivered as a single workshop, a full term module, or a holiday camp.
Cyber Safety Explorers — Years 3 to 6
Four 45-minute sessions on strong passphrases, spotting scam messages, safe sharing, and what to do when something feels wrong online. Story-led with unplugged activities.
Code & Defend — Years 7 to 9
A six-week module blending Python basics with defensive thinking: encryption by hand, how logins really work, and a friendly capture-the-flag finale.
Future Cyber Careers — Years 10 to 12
Careers and pathways sessions with working analysts, plus a live look at a security operations dashboard and guidance on VCE/HSC subject choices.
Passkeys & Privacy workshop
A single-session workshop covering multi-factor authentication, passkeys and personal data footprints — often run for whole year levels.
Holiday cyber camps
Two-day school holiday programs in Melbourne where students build, break and defend a small network in a safe sandbox.
Teacher & parent sessions
Free evening briefings and downloadable classroom resources so the conversation continues after we leave.
Program brochure (PDF)
All six programs in one document — session plans, learning outcomes, curriculum alignment and assessment. Easy to share with your leadership team or P&C.
PDF · 8 pages · 0.1 MB
How we teach
Teaching computer science the way engineers learn it
Four principles sit underneath every Fast Emu session, from a Year 3 unplugged game to a Year 12 careers workshop.
Concepts before tools
Students learn the idea — encryption, authentication, networks — with pens, cards and games before they ever touch a keyboard. The tool then becomes a way to express something they already understand.
Real problems, safe sandboxes
Every activity is based on something our engineers see in real Australian incidents, translated into a closed environment where students can attack and defend without risk to any real system.
Defence first, always
We teach students to think like attackers only so they can build better defences. Every session that touches offensive techniques finishes with the protective control and why it works.
Every student leaves with something
A passphrase plan, a portfolio of Python scripts, a pathway map, a hardening checklist — each program ends with an artefact students keep and can show to family or a future employer.
In the classroom
What students actually learn at each stage
Content is pitched to the year level in the room — the same security ideas, re-taught three ways as students grow.
Primary school (Years 3–6)
Story-led sessions with characters students recognise from games and group chats. Mostly unplugged — card sorts, gallery walks and role plays — so no devices or accounts are needed. The goal is instinct: pause, check, tell an adult.
Core topics
- Strong passphrases
- Spotting scam messages
- Public vs private information
- Getting help fast
Middle years (Years 7–9)
Students start writing real code in a browser sandbox: Python fundamentals through ciphers, hashing and a mock login flow. Every build is attacked by a partner team, then hardened — the rhythm of genuine engineering.
Core topics
- Python programming
- Ciphers and encryption
- Password hashing and salting
- How logins and MFA work
Senior school (Years 10–12)
Career-facing content with working analysts: live alert triage, realistic salary and pathway data for Australia, and portfolio guidance that treats home labs and CTF platforms as evidence of skill, not risk.
Core topics
- Security operations careers
- Alert triage and escalation
- TAFE, university and traineeship routes
- Building a credible portfolio
Detailed curriculum
Session-by-session program detail
Every program is mapped to the Australian Curriculum, has stated learning outcomes, and finishes with something the school keeps.
School case studies
What the programs have delivered
Outcomes from primary, secondary and multi-school engagements across Victoria.
Independent school runs Code & Defend across Years 7 to 9
Challenge: Digital safety was covered once a year at assembly, and the Digital Technologies teacher had no security-specific material or confidence to teach it.
What we did: Fast Emu delivered the six-week Code & Defend module to four classes, co-taught with the classroom teacher, and handed over the full slide deck, sandbox and marking rubric.
Our students now explain multi-factor authentication to their parents. That's the win.
Regional primary cluster shares one Cyber Safety Explorers rollout
Challenge: Five small schools each wanted digital-safety learning but none could justify a program on their own, and travel time made single-school visits impractical.
What we did: We built a shared timetable across the cluster, ran Explorers back-to-back at each site, and finished with a combined parent evening streamed to all five communities.
Sharing the program across the cluster made it affordable and gave our families one consistent message.
Secondary college builds a cyber careers pipeline for Years 10 to 12
Challenge: The careers team found students had no idea what security work involved, and girls in particular were opting out of IT subject selections.
What we did: Two Future Cyber Careers sessions with a deliberately mixed analyst panel, live SOC triage, and follow-up pathway plans reviewed by the school's careers advisors.
Seeing real analysts triage a live alert did more in ninety minutes than a year of careers brochures.
Regional college doubles girls' participation in computing subjects
Challenge: Computing electives at the college skewed heavily male, and many girls told teachers they 'weren't tech people' despite strong results in maths and science.
What we did: Fast Emu ran a Code & Defend stream led by female engineers, a Passkeys & Privacy workshop framed around protecting friends and family, and a mentoring Q&A with women working in security operations.
Having female engineers run the sessions changed what our students believed was possible for them.
Primary school embeds privacy learning across every year level
Challenge: The school's eSmart review found digital safety teaching was inconsistent between classrooms, with no shared language for privacy from Foundation to Year 6.
What we did: We adapted Cyber Safety Explorers into year-band versions, trained all 38 classroom teachers in a half-day professional learning session, and supplied a shared vocabulary poster pack for every room.
For the first time, a Foundation student and a Year 6 student use the same words to talk about staying safe online.
Regional network builds its own cyber teaching capability
Challenge: Schools in the network relied entirely on visiting presenters for digital-technology security content, which made the subject expensive and impossible to timetable regularly.
What we did: Fast Emu ran a term-long teacher professional learning program — co-teaching Code & Defend in each school, then stepping back to observe as classroom teachers led the final weeks, with a shared resource hub.
They worked themselves out of a job, on purpose. That's exactly what a sustainable STEM program should do.
Case studies are illustrative composites based on typical Fast Emu school engagements. Client names are withheld and figures are indicative.
Testimonials
What educators and families say
Feedback from schools, teachers and parents who have hosted Fast Emu STEM programs.
The Code & Defend module completely changed how our students think about technology. They don't just use devices anymore — they question how they work and how to keep them safe.
For a cluster of small regional schools, this was the first time we could offer a specialist STEM program that felt equal to anything in the city. The parent night was the best-attended event of the term.
Our students had heard of hackers in movies but never understood cybersecurity as a career. The live SOC demo and the female analyst panel made it real, and our IT elective numbers prove it worked.
The holiday camp was unlike any coding workshop our sons had done. They came home talking about firewalls, logs and incident response. It was technical, but also age-appropriate and safe.
We had tried guest speakers and posters for years. What worked was girls writing code that kept something safe — and being taught by women who do it for a living.
Training our own teachers meant the program didn't end when the visitors left. Privacy is now just part of how our classrooms talk about technology.
How it works
Simple to book, easy to run
From first call to wrap-up pack, we keep the administrative load on schools as light as possible.
- 01
Scoping call
We discuss year levels, timetable constraints, and how the program maps to the Digital Technologies curriculum.
- 02
Tailored plan
You receive a session-by-session outline, learning outcomes, and the equipment list (usually just school laptops).
- 03
Delivery in class
Our engineers run the sessions on site or online, with a teacher present at all times.
- 04
Wrap-up pack
Students complete a short assessment and the school keeps the slides, activities and take-home guides.
All facilitators hold a current Working with Children Check, and sessions are always run with a school staff member present.
FAQ
Questions schools ask about our STEM programs
Everything you need to know about running Fast Emu sessions in your school, from classroom setup and assessment to timing and cost.
More for schools
Resources, results and reading
Free classroom material, the measured outcomes of our school engagements, and our writing on teaching coding, privacy and cyber careers.
Classroom resources
Free coding kits, lesson plans, classroom tools and rubrics — filterable and exportable as CSV for curriculum planning.
Impact dashboard
Case study counts by year, school size and outcome theme, with students reached and teachers trained.
STEM blog
Posts on coding in schools with limited devices, privacy education that sticks, and cyber career pathways.
Bring Fast Emu to your school
Book a 20-minute scoping call and we'll put together a program outline for your year levels.