Point Cook College is one of Urban Quest’s returning schools. When a school books again, it’s telling — it means the first experience delivered something worth repeating. When their Year 9 students Irene, Payton, and Sophia sat down for an interview immediately after finishing their Urban Quest Melbourne CBD excursion, what they described was specific enough to be genuinely useful for any coordinator considering a similar experience.
How the Team Divided the Work
The role division in this team happened entirely without prompting. Three students, three complementary functions:
“I did the running and the sprinting.”
“I did the directions and I helped solve some of the riddles — I love riddles. Trying to piece together what relates to the hints and the task that was given to us.”
“I learned that they’re both really smart and really motivated.”
That last observation — made about teammates the student barely knew before the day — is the social outcome the format is designed to produce. Irene noted directly: “I honestly didn’t know much about Payton before right now, and now we’ve bonded a lot and worked together.”
A Year 9 student discovering that a classmate is smart and motivated because she watched it happen under pressure is more durable than any classroom introduction. The excursion created the conditions; the students did the rest.
The AC/DC Lane Moment
Every Urban Quest event produces a moment where a team is genuinely stuck. The challenge looks unsolvable. Multiple attempts fail. The competitive pressure mounts. What happens next is what separates teams that give up from teams that don’t.
For Irene, Payton, and Sophia, that moment happened at AC/DC Lane.
“We saw a photo of these numbers and we were just trying to find out what does this mean. We tried so many times — I think we were there the longest.”
The breakthrough came when the team stopped trying to solve it individually and started combining their observations:
“Sophia said, ‘Oh, it’s a number.’ And Payton said, ‘Wait, what if we dial it?’ So we dialled it — and we solved it.”
“That was the occasion where we actually had to do the most teamwork — and it actually worked.”
Three students, three separate observations, one combined solution. That’s the collaboration structure Urban Quest is designed to produce — not “work together” as an instruction, but a challenge architecture where combining different types of thinking is genuinely the most efficient path to the answer.
Staying Positive While Falling Behind
At one point during the Quest, the team noticed other groups ahead of them. Their response to that moment was one of the most mature observations in the interview:
“Even though we were falling behind, we decided to keep our heads high. Even if we don’t finish as winners, finishing all the tasks is still quite an achievement.”
That reframe — from competitive anxiety to measured persistence — is exactly the resilience outcome that school coordinators are looking for in a Year 9 excursion. It didn’t come from a teacher telling them to keep going. It came from the team itself, in the middle of the experience, when it would have been easy to give up.
On Independence and City Navigation
“We got independence as well. We could go around and work at our own pace and we had to find motivation ourselves. We also got the advantage of using technology — and we navigated a lot better and worked out a lot of things better.”
For Year 9 students from Point Cook — 25 kilometres southwest of Melbourne’s CBD — navigating the city independently is genuinely new territory. The structured freedom Urban Quest provides — teams moving through the city without direct adult supervision, guided by the platform rather than by a teacher — creates the conditions for real confidence to develop.
The students’ own advice to future groups captured this precisely:
“It’s going to look very intimidating at first. But then as you progress, it actually gets really fun and really competitive. Just have fun.”
And on whether they’d recommend it as a school excursion:
“Yes. We learned how to navigate through the city — we don’t really do that a lot.”
Why Point Cook Keeps Coming Back
Point Cook College is a returning school. The fact that their coordinator books Urban Quest again for a new Year 9 cohort is the most credible proof available that the experience delivers consistent outcomes. A school that has run it once and seen what it produces for their students — in terms of team dynamics, city confidence, and the kind of unscripted collaboration that happened in AC/DC Lane — doesn’t need to be convinced a second time.
Explore Urban Quest’s school excursions →
Read what other secondary students experienced →
Contact Urban Quest for a school excursion proposal →
Point Cook College is one of Urban Quest’s returning secondary schools. Other schools with Year 9 cohorts who have run Urban Quest CBD excursions include Baimbridge College, Williamstown High School, and Emmaus College.
