Student Activities News goc | 02 Mar 2010
Students Open DCS School Bank
Six fifth year students have recently opened a school bank. The bank will be run by Jack Newton (Manager), Nikesh Chopra (assistant Manager), Conor Dowling (Auditor), Aidan Heffernan (Marketing), Gary Black (Teller) and Aaron Hurley (Teller) and is co-ordinated by Mr Alan White. The bank will be open every Friday from 1.00 – 1.30pm. Since opening, the bank has been gaining momentum and we now have over 60 members after our first two weeks. This is a very positive response from the students. The service will be available to all students in the school and there are various incentives to opening an account such as €10 free call credit for every account opened. The bank will also be running competitions over the course of the year for students who regularly use the bank so watch this space! Conor Dowling (pictured above) recently won a competition for a Nintendo wii. The competition was open to all students who interviewed for a position in the bank. The presentation of the prize was made before the Christmas break.
On 10 March the school bank regional finals will take place in the Sheraton Hotel in Fota. Many schools around the county will be present and we will face some stiff opposition from more established banks. However, we have a good team of students running our bank and we are hopeful that we will do well in this competition. There are some great prizes on offer for successful teams such as iPods for students and vouchers for school supplies, so I know you will all join me in wishing the lads the best of luck in the competition.
Remember it is always a good idea to save a little each week – now more so than ever! So students, don’t forget to use the school bank regularly.
Alan White
General News & Student Activities News goc | 26 Feb 2010
Medecins Sans Frontiers Haiti Appeal
The NT1 class present a cheque for €1717 to Medecins Sans Frontiers’ Haiti Appeal. The money was raised by NT1, who organised a raffle in the school, and by the staff of the school who held a table quiz for staff and friends.
Cian O’Mahony
Past Pupils News & Student Activities News goc | 05 Feb 2010
Web Design at DCS
A group of 20 Transition Year students have just started a module in Web Design in the school. Run by four past pupils who are currently in University College Cork; the Douglas Community School students are learning how to write HTML code. They will each design their own webpage with pictures, links, music and videos. Watch this space, as we hope to post the best ones here! They will also have the opportunity to visit UCC to use the computer labs there, and to show their webpages to the head of the computer studies department.
The past pupils of Douglas Community School who are running these classes are Eoin Coakley, Niall Browne, Aaron Sammon and Conor Hodnett, who are all thoroughly enjoying their return to their alma mater. They feel that they would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to participate in a class like this when they were in Transition Year, and hope that the module may spark an interest in programming for some of the students involved. They hope to see some of our present Transition Years studying Business Information Systems (BIS) or Computer Science in UCC in the years to come!
For those interested in web design, a very useful website is: www.w3schools.com.
C Ó Conaill
Student Activities News goc | 02 Feb 2010
Seeking to Retain Robotics Crown
On 11 February four second year Douglas Community School students will attempt to defend the title of Lego Mindstorms Robotics Champions won last year. The team of Jordan Smith, Daniel Mason, Michael McLaughlin and Eoghan O’Brien have been hard at work learning the new skills involved in robotics and model construction. They then had to build a completely new robot from scratch to complete the task. With minimal help from myself, they have the task well on the way to completion. Jordan even developed a new program that the team of helpers from UCC had never seen before. The task is to drop a ball picked up from a mount into a basket some distance away. ‘Repeating it is to be the hard task,’ reckons Jordan the programmer. ‘We get points fro each time you do it so once is not enough.’
With the construction falling on the group as a whole, Michael and Eoghan are learning to solder to make the scoreboard. ‘Really a different skill to what I’m used to but I’m getting there,’ says Eoghan. It is clear they have already learned so much they feel the competition is only a small part of the challenge.
Good luck to the lads against more than twenty other schools!
N Bronks
Student Activities News goc | 25 Jan 2010
DCS Young Scientists
Douglas Community School has a long history of participation in the Exhibition, with many category winners over the years, and the award for best overall individual project a few years ago. Every year the school is by far the best represented of boys schools in Cork City and County. This year 20 students entered the competition and seven were selected to participate in the exhibition. Stephen O’Sullivan, Luke O’Leary and Eoin Conroy of NS3 studied the possibility of using Catnip as an insect repellant, while their colleagues in third year Otto Cronje and Daniel Leahy investigated the flammability of various materials after treatment with different washing powders. Kevin Twomey and Padraig Wilson McCarthy worked hard on an interesting experiment to optimise the extraction of DNA from plant tissue for the mandatory Leaving Certificate Biology experiment. The students worked very hard in the weeks coming up to the Exhibition and reaped the benefits with the enjoyable and successful week in Dublin.
To find out more about the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition visit http://www.btyoungscientist.ie/.