Borrisokane Community College School Notes
SoPhia Project
For the past two years Borrisokane Community College have entered the SoPHia Project. The SoPHia project aims to encourage more students, especially girls to take up physics as a Leaving Certificate subject.
The Department of Physics and the Science Learning Centre at the University of Limerick, in partnership with the Institute of Physics in Ireland, initially launched the SOPHia Project in 2018. The project aims to encourage young people to form positive perceptions of physics, and to help address the gender imbalance in physics. The project is funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Discover Programme.
This year Borrisokane Community College had thee entries for the student competition. Andrew Hayes, Liam O Regan, Jack Clifford, Kayleigh Brereton, Amy Dunne and Hannah Deasy represented the school. They all received a certificate of participation. Hannahs project reached the finals where she came 2nd place in TY individual submission. The project called ‘Nature did it first: Biomimicry and Physics, What it is? Its link to Physics and What it can be used for?
All projects can be viewed on the SoPhia project website – sophiaphysics.ie
Borrisokane Community College 5K Challenge.
Borrisokane Community College staff will complete a 24hr 5K challenge on 7th May. We are encouraging other to get involved and show support by doing a 5K in your own area, take a picture and tag us #BCC #5Kchallenge.
Money raised donated to Pieta House and Student Support Services. You can donate at https://tinyurl.com/wbpp9z7y.
Coding Fleadh.
Borrisokane Community College and Colaiste Mhuire Thurles participated in a coding Fleadh this week. Well done to Coilin Dorris who created ‘Space Shooter’ and Emil Daly who created ‘Escape from Castle Wolfenstein’ and were part of the winners on the day. Well done to everyone who participated.
WorldWise Global Schools Conference 2021
On Thursday 26th of April fifteen second year students, along with Ms Linehan and Ms Marks attended the virtual WorldWise Global Schools Annual Conference. The theme for the day was ‘Our journey towards racial justice’.
We were first met by Valery Molay who was the MC for the day. She spoke about the layout of the day and told us that racial justice is about making it possible for anyone to do anything, no matter what race they are. Our first activity was a mentimeter quiz which allowed us to learn some shocking facts including that teachers receive no anti-racism training despite it being recommended since 2002 and that Ireland has one of the highest rates of workplace racism in the EU. This was followed by a panel and Q&A with Sandrine Ndahiro, Martin Beanz Ward and Boniface Odoemene. They spoke to us about their own personal experiences with racism and the work they do. After our break we had a panel session with students who have completed projects centering on racial justice and they gave us great inspiration and ideas for our work in our school.
The centre part of the day focused on an offline activity which we completed together with the help of Ms Linehan and Ms Marks. The activity centered on our vision of what we want our school to look like in the future in terms of racial justice. These ideas included how we deal with racism, making our school an equal place, bringing a means of reporting racism anonymously to the school and focusing on racial justice education for everyone in our school community.
The final part of our day included another a student panel and a panel with Francesca Hutchinson and Denise Chaila. Denise taught us that we don’t have to always say the right thing, even the people we look up to don’t know how. It’s not about saying the perfect thing, it’s about saying something.
We learned that anything we do can have an impact and we are looking forward to continuing our journey and working on it in our school.
Georgia Darcy, Liam Foley and Ms Marks.
