Abingdon News No.55

www.abingdon.org.uk 5 Abingdon News County Winner – Poetry by Heart Congratulations to lower sixth former Kit Matthews who won the Poetry by Heart county competition. Kit performed an extract from Milton’s Paradise Lost and impressed the judges by his mature and intelligent interpretation. Watch the performance . ASP hosts Science Coordinators The ASP hosted its first ever remote meeting of the Abingdon Partnership of Schools Science Coordinators’ Specialist Group. The theme, which had been decided before this academic year started, was, rather ironically, Outdoor and Environmental Learning Opportunities. However, one of the positive benefits of remote meetings is that they can attract a larger number of participants and speakers from further afield. On this occasion there were 19 participants from primary and secondary schools in Abingdon and from as far afield as Blackburn and Portsmouth. Abingdon’s Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning, Lucy Moonen, and award- winning illustrator Gillian Johnson, have put pen to paper to write a book to provide a gentle introduction to conversations about COVID-19 with very young children. Simon and Rosie is a tale of friendship, loneliness, imagination and self-acceptance. The story is available as a free download at www.SimonandRosie.com. A voluntary donation to the NHS is suggested via www.NHScharitiestogether.co.uk , in recognition of the heroic work it is doing to combat the pandemic. Cosmic mining Over the last year, three lower sixth students have participated in the Cosmic Mining Project hosted by the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) in collaboration with the James Webb Telescope science team. The aim of the project is to assist the scientists in identifying potentially interesting target objects to investigate in more detail using the enhanced instrumentation available on the James Webb Space Telescope due for launch next March. Ashwin Tennant, Scott Yap and Ivan Gabestro worked together to learn the methods needed to identify the spectra of various types of stellar objects and then applied these to identification of several training sets of data. The James Webb team then sent feedback and analysis hints from the training sets until the Abingdon team was judged to be sufficiently competent to work on unseen data sets, the ones the scientists are really interested in analysing. Ashwin, Scott and Ivan have produced a video presentation on their project, no mean feat whilst being at home during lockdown in Oxford, Moscow and Hong Kong. This can be viewed here .