First in class: Shane O’Sullivan

Douglas Community School extends its warmest congratulations to Shane O’Sullivan who sat his Leaving Certifcate Examinations last year.  Shane scored an extremely impressive double: he was awarded the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland Medal for attaining the highest marks in the country in Chemistry, and he was also awarded an Entrance Bursary to Trinity College Dublin.

6272 students sat the Higher Level Chemistry paper in June 2011 – Shane scored the highest mark in the country, n accolade he shares with just one other student.  Shane’s First Place in Chemistry is a testament to his application to, and flair for, the sciences.  It is also a testament to the exceptionally high level of science teaching in the school, which is helped by ever more well-equipped laboratories and specialist teachers in each subject.

Shane is continuing his scientific pursuits at Trinity College, where he is now studying First Year Genetics.  His potential has been recognised by TCD, who are clearly delighted to have him as a student, and have awarded him an Entrance Bursary – Shane is definitely one to watch out for in the future!

(L-R) James Connolly, Conor Powell, and Emmett O'Sullivan (all DCS Second Years). They are playing a 3D version of noughts and crosses - the aim is to get three balls of the same colour in a row, in any direction. In the usual noughts and crosses there are eight different possible ways you can have three in a row - in this game, there are 76 different ways in which you can do it!

Seven DCS students – four from First Year and three from Second Year – took part in the inaugural Maths Circles Open Day in the Lifetime Lab (located in the old waterworks on the lee road) on Saturday 21 March. The day was organised by the Maths Circles initiative, which is run by staff from UCC, CIT, and Douglas Community School, and helps organise after-school maths clubs for First Years in schools around Cork.  DCS was the first school in Cork to get involved in the programme, and the Maths Circle at DCS will continue to run right until the end of May.

At the Open Day, First and Second Year students from schools around Cork were invited to tour the Lifetime Lab, and try the different puzzles and challenges that were laid out around the facility. The DCS students clearly enjoyed themselves, enthusiastically (and mostly successfully!) tackling the various games and problems.

After a short lunch break, students took part in a problem-solving table quiz. Students were split up so that no team would feature two students from the same school. Nonetheless, DCS had a student on both the winning and the running-up teams, and so particular congratulations are due to Sean Barber of first year who was on the second placed team, and Patryk Hadjul, also of first year, who was on the winning team. We look forward to next year’s open day, and the Maths Circle classes that we will have between now and then!

Sample question from the quiz

Paul the Octopus has, not unusually, eight tentacles. He also likes wearing octuples of socks (i.e. eight matching socks). One morning, before the light is turned on in the aquarium, Paul goes to his sock drawer, rummages around, and starts to pull out socks. If he has black socks, red socks, and yellow socks (being a patriotic German), how many socks must he pull out to be sure that he has eight all the same colour?

Ciarán Ó Conaill

(from left to right) Marian Daly, Michael Moynihan (who set the questions and coordinated the competition), Krysztof and his father.

Congratulations to Krysztof Wriblewski, First Year student at DCS, who came a very impressive Second Place at the IMTA First Year Maths Competition on Saturday 28 April. Out of 5,000 students nationwide who took part in the first round of the competition, 500 were invited to take part in the final, held simultaneously in twelve centres around the country. Three of our own DCS First Year students qualified for the final – Sean Barber, Sean Grace, and Krysztof.

On the day, students had to attempt 25 problem-solving questions over the course of an hour. Sean Grace scored a very respectable 100 out of a possible 150 marks, while Sean Barber managed 133, to leave him on fourth place, just outside of the medals. Krysztof was the best placed of the DCS students – answering 24 of the 25 questions correctly, he scored 144 out of 150, missing out on First Place by the narrowest of margins.

The three students, who are all involved in the DCS Maths Circle, enjoyed themselves enormously at the morning – and they all think that it is a shame they won’t be able to take part in the competition again next year!

Ciarán Ó Conaill

Ciarán Ó Conaill

Four students from Douglas Community School took part in the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad Final in DCU on Tuesday 20 March. The DCS team, composed of Daragh Fleming, Eoin Bourke, Stephen O’Sullivan and Brendan O’Brien, qualified for the final by scoring in the top hundred in the country in the first round.

The lads were aided by two Linguistics students from Trinity College, Dublin, who came to Cork in the week before the final to give them some coaching on strategies that they might adopt in the Olympiad. One of the tutors, Melissa Sorensen, had herself been a member of the Irish Linguistics Olympiad Team, and she was very impressed with our boys’ firm grasp of the underlying principles and approaches to linguistics.

The day itself was long but rewarding – students competed in an individual paper in the morning, from which the Irish team will be selected, and a team paper in the afternoon. The DCS students reckoned that the morning paper was reasonably straightforward, with the exception of the last question, and so felt that it might be very tight at the top when it comes to selecting the team members! The team paper was trickier, as might be expected, with the last question proving impenetrable for all students, judging by the comments afterwards.

The results of both the individual and team competitions will be announced in the next two weeks.

Ciarán Ó Conaill

The AILO challenges students to apply logic and reasoning skills to solve complex puzzles in unfamiliar languages. The first round included questions on relatively well-known languages such as  Dutch and Danish, and more obscure ones, like Yolmo (“a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 10,000 people”) and Bardi (an Aboriginal language, with only “a handful of fluent speakers”). Students essentially become code-breakers, and must attempt to use fragments of an unfamiliar language to extrapolate the underlying rules of the language. However, many of the techniques used in this kind of analysis are actually used far more widely than might be imagined – two well-known examples would be Apple’s Siri voice recognition system, and the Google Translate machine translation engine. So computational linguistics, as this field is known, is actually all around us!

Our students found the problems challenging, engrossing, sometimes frustrating, and occasionally addictive – they required, for their solution, a blend of logic, perseverance, and ingenuity which was clearly possessed in abundance by a number of DCS students! Those competing in the AILO final will receive individual tuition – tutors will travel from Trinity College to DCS the week before the final, to advise them on different strategies and approaches they might use. We hope they manage to put them to good use in the final!

Ciarán Ó Conaill

The DCS team was composed of Stephen O’Sullivan, Shahrukh Nawaz, Oisín Dwane and Shane O’Sullivan, all in Fifth Year.  Their preparation for the quiz involved trying to cram their remaining year of Physics into a single week, while brushing up on their trivia and practising their Mathematical problem-solving. It obviously paid dividends, as they managed to navigate the rounds of Maths, Physics, and General Knowledge questions with aplomb, and they netted a snazzy Easypix DVC-5127 digital camcorder each, sponsored by EMC, as well as the title of best Fifth Year team.

They now have their sights set firmly on next year’s quiz!

Ciaran O Conaill

The Biology Department has just received a brand new class set of top of the range microscopes which will be used in both Leaving Certificate and Junior Certificate classes for mandatory experiments and other investigations which the boys conduct, often in their own time.   Another innovation in the area of Maths and Science has been the purchase and use of a full class set of  datalogging equipment.  Dataloggers are handheld computers which are able to measure a large variety of variables such as temperature, acid levels,sound, voltage, pressure and force.  The collected data is used by the boys in the classroom to bring to life such topics as statistics, co-ordinate geometry and basic arithmetic.  With such developments the marriage of Science and Mathematics in Douglas Community School is indeed a very happy one.

Well done to the staff and students in the Science and Maths departments as such cross-curricular collaboration and investigation is the bedrock of the new Project Maths programme and the future economic upturn of our country.  Indeed, it is great to see continued investment in these areas by the school for the boys, even in such straitened times.

Cian O’Mahony

Four teams of fifth years and two teams of second years attended the exhibition with Science teacher, Cian O’Mahony, and all were commended by the judges for their work and presentation.  The boys thoroughly enjoyed the experience and it has certainly further enthused them to continue studying Maths and Science into the future.  Conor O’Gorman, Paul Wood and Ronan Dwane did a very interesting study on booklice, while their class mates Kyle Twomey and Alan Johnston looked at lichens in the Cork area.  Fifth year students Stephen O’Sullivan, Paul O’Keeffe and Otto Cronje studied surface tension of water ,while their classmates Brendan O’Brien, Luke O’Leary and Aidan Donegan studied the decline of the Cordyline tree during the big freeze of 2010.  Shane O’Sullivan in Fifth Year did an individual project on the possibility of using body heat to charge batteries.

Congratulations to all the boys for representing the school so well and good luck to all those thinking of entering the 2013 competition.

Cian O’Mahony