Bishop’s athletes show their talents at District Athletics

On Friday 30th June, Miss Cameron, Mrs Waters, Miss Esterhuizen and Mrs Newberry took the Athletics teams in Years 7,8,9 and 10 to the District Athletics Competition at Ridlins Athletics Stadium in Stevenage.

It was a fantastic day full of excellent individual and team results in surprisingly good weather (compared to last years unexpected washout which left us looking like drowned rats for most of the day!).

Notable performances below –

Year 7 Favour Nwoka – 200m – 1st place and District Champion with a time of 29.2 seconds. Favour Nwoka – 100m – 2nd place with a time of 14.3 seconds (1st place also got 14.3 but track judges deemed the Dame Alice Owens athlete to have just beat Favour with the dip at the line) Ruby Euesden – Day – Javelin – 2nd place with a best throw of 19.61m and a new PB Isobel Lofty – 800m – 3rd with a time of 2:51.4 seconds

OVERALL – The Year 7 girls placed 3rd out of 12 schools with 40 points.

Year 8 Connie Dykes – Hurdles – 1st place and District Champion with a time of 13.3 seconds. Huri Kamara – 300m – 1st place and District Champion with a time of 46.3 seconds. NEW DISTRICT RECORD Anneliesse Agbanyo – Discus- 2nd place with a best throw of 19.65m Georgia Wharton – Long Jump – 2nd place with a best jump of 4.24m Connie Dykes – High Jump – 2nd place with a best jump of 1.31m Georgia Wharton – 200m – 3rd with a time of 31.5 seconds Huri Kamara – Triple Jump – – 3rd with a best throw of 8.36m 4 x 100m relay team (Connie, Huri, Zahra and Georgia)- 3rd place with a time of 57.1 seconds.

OVERALL – The Year 8 girls placed 3rd out of 12 schools with 56 points.

Year 9 Arabella Ashby – Discus – 1st place and District Champion with a best throw of 20.60m. Arabella Ashby – Javelin – – 2nd place with a best throw of 18.22m Dyllis Osei – Agyemang – High Jump – 1st place and District Champion with a best jump of 1.37m Dyllis Osei – Agyemang – Long Jump – 1st place and District Champion with a best throw of 4.53m Evie Dixon – 100m – 3rd place with a time of 14.5 seconds Jolana Hewitt – 300m 3rd place with a time of 49 seconds 4 x 100m relay team (Erin W, Jolana, Dyllis and Zoe)- 3rd place with a time of 57.5 seconds

OVERALL – The Year 9 girls placed 2nd out of 12 schools with 64 points

Year 10 Daniella Okoye – 200m – 1st place and District Champion with a time of 28.9 seconds. Lucy Claridge – 800m 2nd place with a time of 2:56.2 seconds Evie Jackson – Discus – 2nd place with a best throw of 19.77m Ella Studholme – Javelin – 2nd place with a best throw of 23.68m Daniella Okoye – Triple Jump – 2nd place with a best jump of 10.34m Gracie Kirby- Long Jump – 2nd place with a best jump of 3.90m Libby Porter – Hurdles – 3rd place with a time of 14.3 seconds Libby Porter – Hurdles – 3rd place with a best jump of 1.35m Ruva Rusike – 100m – 3rd place with a time of 14.2 seconds Erin Munday – 300m – 3rd place with a time of 49.3 seconds Anna Stewart – 1500m – 3rd place with a time of 05:55.3 seconds

OVERALL – The Year 10 girls placed 2nd out of 12 schools with 60 points

This left us with an overall score of 220 points and finishing in 3rd place behind Queenswood in 2nd and Dame Alice Owens in 1st place.

A fantastic day of competition and excellent effort, teamwork and resilience shown throughout. Well done to all of the pupils in the District teams! Thank you to Mrs Waters, Miss Esterhuizen and Mrs Newberry for coming along on the day and to all staff who allowed pupils to miss their lessons to attend.

Industrial cadet teams learn more about STEM at Computacenter to celebrate Women in Engineering Day

The two teams arrived at Computacenter excited and ambitious to learn more about STEM. The girls were given passes and were shown a presentation room by the host of the event at Computacenter where the teams would be spending most of their time in. They began with a quick presentation about what Computacenter is, what the company does and about the host and her co-worker and how they got here. The presentation was very informative and it already taught the girls that they didn’t need a career in STEM to work at a large Tech based company such as Computacenter. You need people in different departments to work different jobs that don’t require a background in STEM such as Sales, Marketing, content creation, etc.

After the presentation, we were given a tour of their large warehouse filled with hardware, where we learnt how they organised all their products and how it was exported to every customer. We were also shown all their services, such as personally customised packaging and personalised software instalments and updates. We learnt how Computacenter found the best way to reduce pollution due to electronic devices by reusing them instead of recycling them. After this insightful tour, we were put into workshops. The first one we did was driving a robot. We saw first hand how difficult it was to control the robot to make sure it would not crash, but those of us who were gamers found it much easier! The second workshop we moved onto was a face scanning machine, which scans your face and tells you what Hogwarts House you’re in. We had a look at the coding and how it worked, and we were given advice on where to get bits of code so we could create our own program. The final workshop of the day was about OBS, a streaming platform. We had a chance to perform our own little show/podcast while also being able to see all the work that goes into streaming from behind the scenes. We were then given a lunch break before we began our quick networking program. Volunteers from the Computacenter came in to talk to us about their work, how they got to their position and we were allowed to ask questions throughout the five minutes we had with each volunteer.

After a full day at Computacenter, our two industrial cadet teams had learnt a lot about STEM, from the technical point of it and the behind-the-scenes work of how to get into STEM. The girls also learnt about apprenticeships and possible work experience at Computacenter, which many thought of as they will have have to find some work experience next year. Computacenter has given our two industrial cadet teams an insight into the field of STEM and what it’s like to step into the real world. Thank you Computacenter for such an educational and wonderful experience!

Prudence C

Journey across the world

On Tuesday 6th June, our Modern Foreign Language Faculty held the sixth Languages Discovery Day, which was delivered by 67 Year 10 Young MFL Leaders who shared their cultures, languages and linguistic interests with 120 Year 5 Boys and Girls from Oak View and St Philip Howard RC Primary Schools. The Key Stage 2 pupils had the opportunity to experience twenty-three different languages from all around the world including special workshops in British Sign Language, Semaphore, Greek dancing, Yoruba, Persian and Maori and many more from all round the world, reflecting and sharing our diverse heritages at the school. The day was divided in 162 workshops with 31 different language and cultural foci. By all accounts the day was a great success. Special praise is due to the Young Leaders for their infectious enthusiasm which gave the event such a buzz and celebrated the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of our school!

One of our Young MFL Leader, Sophie G, said:

The students from other schools and the young MFL leaders here at our school all came together to appreciate and learn about other cultures and languages. I really enjoyed teaching the children and seeing them so eager to learn, and I know that the other young MFL leaders enjoyed the day as well. I loved looking around at the different activities the other groups planned, there was so much diverse culture that even I learnt new languages and traditions within a culture myself. I feel that I highly benefitted from this course, learning many new skills and working on my patience skills as well as learning how to adapt when children needed more support. I believe I have grown from this fun, exciting and challenging day and I hope to get involved in more activities like this in the future.