Hume Central Secondary College on Urban Quest — A Real-World Excursion for VCE VM and VPC Students

VCE Vocational Major and VPC students are a specific cohort with specific needs. They learn best through hands-on experience rather than instruction. They thrive in real-world contexts rather than simulated ones. They need activities that feel genuinely relevant to their lives rather than activities designed for academic pathways and adapted for everyone else.

Madison Krstevski is a VCE-VM Year 11 and 12 teacher at Hume Central Secondary College. When she was looking for an excursion for her Year 12 VM and VPC students that would support their Personal Development Skills curriculum, she chose Urban Quest’s Melbourne CBD school excursion.

Her reasoning was direct:

“Part of vocational learning is that students are doing things out in the wild — hands-on activities, real-life experience. We thought Urban Quest was a really good way to get them to work together in a real, hands-on, real-world context.”

Why Urban Quest Fits the VM and VPC Curriculum

The VCE Vocational Major and VPC pathways are built around applied learning — students developing capabilities through doing rather than studying. Personal Development Skills, one of the core VM strands, specifically requires students to work collaboratively, reflect on their own strengths and contributions, and develop capabilities through real-world application.

Urban Quest’s competitive team challenge format maps directly to those outcomes in a way that most excursion activities don’t. Teams of students navigate Melbourne’s CBD together, solving challenges that require genuine communication, strategic task allocation, and collective problem-solving — all within a two-hour window, competing against other teams on a live leaderboard.

Madison identified these outcomes explicitly when describing what she was hoping her students would take away:

“We were hoping that today they would understand how to solve problems a bit better together. How to work together as a team, how to work through any conflicts. Maybe find out what some of their strengths are. Really just getting them to learn more about themselves and about each other.”

Each of those outcomes — collaborative problem-solving, conflict navigation, strengths identification — is directly assessable against Personal Development Skills criteria. Urban Quest doesn’t just complement the VM curriculum; it gives teachers observable evidence of students demonstrating those capabilities in an authentic context.

“Made for Schools” — What That Actually Means in Practice

For busy teachers coordinating excursions alongside full teaching loads, the administrative experience of booking and running the activity matters as much as the activity itself. Madison described the coordination process specifically:

“The reason I say I would recommend Urban Quest to other schools is because the coordination has been really easy. It’s been a really smooth process.”

She also reflected on the sense that Urban Quest had been specifically designed with school groups in mind rather than adapted from a corporate format:

“I felt that the processes and the activity itself was crafted and refined to make everything easy and accessible for schools like ours.”

That accessibility — from the booking process through to the briefing on the day — is something Urban Quest has deliberately built into its school program over more than a decade of delivering excursions. The starting and finishing point at the State Library of Victoria, directly opposite Melbourne Central Station, means no complicated navigation for student groups arriving by public transport. The smartphone-guided format means no printed materials to manage, no equipment to distribute, and no technical setup required from teachers on the day.

Year 12 Students — A Challenging Audience

Year 12 students, particularly those in vocational pathways, are an honest audience. They disengage from activities that feel like they’ve been designed for someone else, or that underestimate their capability.

Madison was candid about the engagement dynamic:

“I think maybe to begin with they were a bit sceptical. They all gave it a go — they scanned onto the QR codes. During the activity, it seems like they all attempted at least the first few. But I do think they got a bit fatigued by the end.”

That honest account is more useful than a glowing summary. What it describes is a cohort that engaged meaningfully at the start — which for Year 12 VM and VPC students is genuinely not guaranteed — and worked through the challenge before fatigue set in toward the end. For a group Madison describes as having become more mature and capable over the year, that’s a meaningful outcome.

Her insight on what helps this cohort engage was specific:

“Perhaps a compelling prize or reward for completing the activities and being the winning team. Often a rewards-based approach can be helpful in getting them more engaged.”

Urban Quest’s format already builds this in — the competitive leaderboard, the post-event ceremony where the winning team is recognised and their strategy celebrated, and the all-time historical leaderboard where the best-performing school groups are ranked. For students who respond to visible, tangible acknowledgement of achievement, the awards ceremony is often the moment the day crystallises.

Augmented Reality as a Point of Difference

One specific element of the Urban Quest experience that stood out for Madison was the augmented reality technology:

“I think the kids will probably talk most about the fact that it got a bit challenging. And also the augmented reality — that’s maybe something they haven’t done as much of. I’d actually be really interested to hear how they found that experience.”

For VM and VPC students whose curriculum involves digital literacy and technology as applied capabilities, encountering AR in a purposeful real-world context — not in a classroom setting, but navigating Melbourne’s CBD as part of a competitive challenge — is a genuinely novel and curriculum-relevant experience.

What the Experience Reinforced

Madison’s observation about the relationship between Urban Quest and Hume Central’s existing classroom work is worth noting specifically:

“I don’t think I noticed anything different in how they work together. But I do think it kind of solidifies some of the ways we’ve seen them work together in the classroom. Maybe some of that groundwork we’ve done has gotten us to a point where they can do an experience like this and work a bit better together.”

That observation reframes what a successful excursion looks like for a VM cohort. It’s not always about revelation — it’s sometimes about consolidation. Students demonstrating in an external, unstructured environment the collaborative capabilities they’ve been developing in class is exactly what the Personal Development Skills outcomes are designed to produce evidence of.

Her overall verdict:

“In comparison to other excursions we’ve run previously with this group — I would say better. They’re a little bit older and further into Year 12, a little bit more mature. They were a lot more capable to take on the tasks given.”

“I think although the kids may have found the activities slightly challenging — a challenge is always good for them to grow.”

Explore Urban Quest’s secondary school excursions →

Read what teachers look for in a school excursion →

Contact Urban Quest for a school excursion proposal →

Madison Krstevski is a VCE VM Year 11 and 12 teacher at Hume Central Secondary College. Urban Quest delivered a Melbourne CBD school excursion for the school’s Year 12 VM and VPC cohort.