Abingdon News No. 57

Abingdon News Young Enterprise Two of the School’s Young Enterprise teams presented their projects to an online Dragons Den style event, hosted by Young Enterprise. This was for schools in the Oxford region and each team had ten minutes to answer questions from the panel. Both teams were questioned on aspects regarding sales, use of social media, overall strategy, sustainability and how they responded to the ever-changing national situation. Each team was commended on their work and we await the results! First years were given the challenge of creating a model of an iconic piece of Roman technology as part of their Latin course. The results were very impressive with real creativity and ingenuity being used to recreate aqueducts, hypocausts and Roman roads. Spanish online influencers Lower sixth students studying Spanish enjoyed becoming an online ‘influencer’ for a day, recording video adverts to practise their language skills. You can watch the videos in the news section of the website. Roman technology 8 Lower sixth students studying French enjoyed three Zoom webinars with the Alliance Française in Oxford. The morning began with an overview of French cinema, followed by an informative and lively discussion on freedom of expression in France in the context of Charlie Hebdo. The final session, on pronunciation, saw the pupils in fine voice as they learnt how to vary their intonation of high frequency vocabulary in different contexts. Our thanks go to the Alliance for putting on such an engaging and rewarding programme. Alliance Française Abingdon enjoyed outstanding success this year in the Physics Olympiad which is an exam-based competition for upper sixth physicists. Ashwin Tennant and Will Taylor achieved the gold award putting them among the top 100 students nationally, out of about 1600 entrants, and earning them a place in Round 2, where a spot on the national Olympiad team is up for grabs. Six students received the very impressive silver award and a further eight the bronze award and commendations. British Physics Olympiad First years have been making motte-and-bailey castles for their history homework. The students could use any materials they liked and we saw a wide variety of styles, ranging from edible castles, through to both miniature and giant structures. Motte-and-bailey castles We had several impressive video and photographic submissions too, particularly where transportation difficulties prevented the model making it into school. It was difficult to judge, and a large number of commendations were awarded with four models being kept on display by the History department.