NEW ICT CAREER READY COHORT
Fourteen students have been chosen to undertake the ICT
Career Ready programme this year. This involves the students
being paired with a mentor in business and undertaking a paid
4/6 week internship. Many thanks to our sponsors this year
Aviva, Turner & Townsend, Royal Mail and Asda.
Also congratulations to our 2015/2016 cohort on completing
the programme, they received excellent feedback on their internships and were a credit to
the Academy.
Miss Dobson – ICT Department
UKMT SENIOR TEAM MATHS CHALLENGE
On Thursday 10th November, two Year 12 and two Year 13 students
went to Leeds University to complete in the UKMT Maths challenge.
This involved taking part in three rounds of Maths related challenges
and accumulating points with the aim of achieving the greatest total.
The first round involved solving 10 complex problems as a group –
unfortunately we only managed to get three correct! Automatically
this put us at a disadvantage against other teams in the room – I’m sure some teams had
child geniuses amongst their members!
Round 2 was a crossword puzzle that needed the team to split into two groups – one half
worked on the across clues whilst the others worked on the down clues. We completed the
crossword with very few mistakes!
The final round was 4 sets of questions with an 8 minute time limit – bonus marks were
awarded for finishing before 6 minutes were up. Our scores on this section ranged from 15
to 0 – and we realised our chances of a top half finish had disappeared.
To the delight of the students we finished in 17th position (out of 24 teams). Overall it was
an enjoyable – yet challenging – evening made all the better by the other students and the
chance to use our skills in abstract settings.
Mr Walgate – Maths Department
GOOGLE ACTIVITY – MORE ABLE & TALENTED MATHS STUDENTS
Year 8 Maths students were involved in a very enjoyable and informative event, here is a
write up by Year 8 student Ella:
Last Thursday, November 24th, I took part in an afterschool event hosted by Mr
Tompkins. I thoroughly enjoyed the event and I found Mr Tompkins to be a very
good instructor! The activities we took part in were very humorous and enjoyable.
We were solving problems that have been asked at interview candidates hoping to
work at Google. For example “how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” We had
to discuss what information we needed to collect to estimate the answer.
All the groups had fun and I cannot wait for next week!”
BCS EXAMS
ECDL is recognised globally as the world’s leading IT literacy qualification.
It covers the basic to more challenging IT skills, such as custom
spreadsheet functions, mail merges and the creation of complex charts
and graphs. Based entirely online, ECDL’s assessments and marking are
fully automated, eradicating any margin for error; students receive an
immediate result which, in most cases, is a fantastic morale boost. The
qualification enables students to gain digital literacy skills and leave them
in a much better position when they leave the academy.
Miss Dobson has once again been coordinating the programme this year
with students gaining exceptional results. At the moment over 100 Year
11 students have completed the qualification, many with Distinction*
grades. More exams are scheduled during the mock exam period along with drop down days
for Year 10 students next term.
Mr Donlon – ICT Department