All posts by Chris Maunder

World Book Day

Chace students and staff were involved in various activities to celebrate books and reading on 1st March -World Book Day 2018. Students had to recognise which characters the staff were dressed as and used the opportunity to talk about reading! We also did, “Drop everything and read” during lesson 1. Students read their own book, were read to or read a short story on the whiteboards.

Duke of Edinburgh’s Award – Expedition Training Day

Well done to our Year 10 Duke of Edinburgh’s award group who took part in their first taste of DofE adventure by participating in an Expedition Training day on Wednesday 21 March.
The 18 students navigated around Hertfordshire, cooked their own lunch on stoves, pitched tents and learnt some vital First Aid skills.
These skills will be valuable when they take part in their Bronze expeditions in May and June.

Safer Internet Day on 06 Feb 2018

You may have noticed in our recent bulletin a feature advising students how to gradually stop depending on social media as part of a seven-day Digital Detox. We took this message further during a recent year 7 assembly and demonstrated to students and their form tutors what positive effect it could have to make more active use of their time during the half-term break to be “offline” than to continually communicate online.

In addition, our Digital Eagle, Moska Suratgar from year 9, enlightened her audience by demonstrating how much time it would take a hacker to decode a simple password and a complex password. Judging from the brief murmurs in the background, this took most students and their form tutors by surprise.

Moska demonstrated how to create a complex password, so that users can improve the protection level of their information, whether it’s a simple login to the computer network or viewing emails.

By having a complex password, you can ensure for a safer computing experience knowing that your information is better protected. Try combining two words together, intermixed with numbers and special characters, such as £, $, %, ^ or &.

If you are wondering that those characters are called, they are: pound sign; dollar sign, percent; caret; and ampersand.

Skype an Engineer

Students in Year 9-11 who have a passion for Engineering we able to participate in a STEM event where Chace Community School skyped a Structural Engineer from Burohappold Engineers, London. Burohappold designed structures such as Tottenham Hotspurs’ stadium, the Arsenal stadium and the O2 Arena.  The students who represented Chace were interested, enthusiastic and asked brilliant questions. This was a great opportunity for students to speak to a person working in industry and ask questions that are relevant to our students.

Hour of Code

An annual global event called Hour of Code was observed by a group of students on Wednesday 06 December. This particular local event was organised by the Barclays Digital Eagles team, who recently trained three of our Year 9 students to train others on aspects of keeping safe online (keep an eye on the Chace website for our forthcoming presentation in the summer term of 2018).

The event took place within the grandeur of the Palace of Westminster. Under the auspices of the lead Digital Eagles, our students practiced writing computer code, some for the first time.

Hour of Code is organised by Code.org. Their objective of is to give younger students an opportunity to learn computer science, helping to nurture problem-solving skills, logic and creativity. In their own words: “…by starting early, students will have a foundation for success in any 21st-century career path.”