Abingdon News No.50

www.abingdon.org.uk 9 Abingdon News Girls from St Helen’s joined Abingdon sixth formers studying English to hear Dr Niall Munro (OA) give a fascinating lecture on American literature. Students from the Abingdon Model United Nations took part in the annual two day MUNHIGH conference on Justice, at the Manchester High School for Girls. The event is one of the largest held in the north west with over 330 delegates from 28 schools taking part. Abingdon delegates represented Iran and Burkino Faso and debated a huge range of topics including, maintaining peace on the Korean peninsula and the issue of colonisation in space. The boys came away with several awards including outstanding delegate awards for James Gibson and Lancelot Wilson. They also won the prestigious Outstanding Delegation award for representing Iran. MUNHIGH English students enjoy American Literature Sixth form pupil Kiran Gathani gave a very impressive performance at the Chinese New Year Celebration organised by Oxford Brookes University and China Hunan TV. He read one of the most famous Chinese poems, “Farewell to Cambridge Again” by Xu Zhimo, in front of students, teachers and guests from the local area and China and Hong Kong. Chinese New Year First year students from Abingdon and St Helen’s met for a Thinking Supper, and discussed articles on driverless cars and a range of related issues over dinner. The students then took it in turns to present their conclusions. Thinking Supper Blott Matthews Challenge Success Since September, four teams of lower sixth students have spent two hours of their lunchtime each week working on the Blott Matthews Engineering challenge. This year’s challenge was to come up with a way to transport a one-ton load from the North Pole to the South Pole without picking up or dropping off extra equipment on the way. Teams submitted a report in February and then attended the final presentation day where they were quizzed in detail. Abingdon teams were very successful with Team Apex placed third and Team Polar Reach winning the competition.