Notre Dame Collegiate in High River is prepping students for a future that's unknown.

Principal Jodi deKlerk says their STEAM classes feature science, technology, engineering, arts and math that give students plenty of options for their careers after school.

"At the school division level, we actually have a new coding initiative, where students in various grades will be given the opportunity to learn coding and computer programming. Here at our own school, we actually started it last year, we've embedded a lot of projects into our regular classes, so for example in our Science 7 class they do hatch baby chicks and talk about that whole process and in our grade 8 math class we have been doing this for several years now, we use the Junior Achievement Financial Literacy program and we've really expanded our options and targeted our options."

deKlerk says they offer all the regular options, but they've also expanded to include others that give students a chance to acquire skills that can be used in other fields.

"Some of the ones we've offered for a while now are Sports Medicine, Elite Athletics, Synthetic Biology and of course within the computer realm, our new Media and Design studies is a phenomenal program and really expanding within the arts as well because that's what STEAM does, it's about the arts, knowing that the arts programs also help students to learn visual learning and problem-solving."

Students in grades 7 and 8 are able to take robotics and that expands to grade 9 next year.

Right now, they're building LEGO robots and programming them to do tasks.

"Not every kid is going to want to do that realm so these options are diverse enough that, take sports medicine, that goes into the world of health care and synthetic biology, that goes into health care and knowing that those are positions that people might want to do and really trying to honour where our kids are at and the interests that they have, even looking into art and music and drama, that creativity and collaboration that comes from those classes are so important in every subject."

deKlerk says 76 per cent of their students attend a post-secondary school within three years of graduating high school compared to the provincial average of 60 per cent.

And she points out 98.5 per cent of students graduate from Notre Dame within three years, again well above the provincial average.

deKlerk says they offer many more programs than most people would think they do because of its size.