All posts by Miss Dean

Northern Lights Celebration Event

On Wednesday 25th May, Robert Gordon University hosted the second Northern Lights Celebration event. Northern Lights is a program run for Northfield Academy by RGU. The aim of the program is for S1 and S2 pupils to experience university and inspire them to consider higher education in the future.

This year the S1 group learned about what university is and what it can offer, one thing that stuck out for one pupil was toast club. They visited the school of Architecture and were hands on in a number of activities including building castles out of cards and stop animation. For the final S1 session pupils discussed careers and personal qualities, after matching qualities to careers pupils began to think about the qualities that they have and what they may be able to do with them in the future.

The S2 group visited the RGU campus three times this year, each time visiting a different faculty and experiencing a wide range of hands on activities. In engineering they created complicated circuits, in media they made radio and tv clips and at the health faculty they tested their balance when working with physiotherapy students and lecturers.

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At the celebration event some pupils shared their experiences of the program, then guests got to see some of the activities for themselves with pupil helpers to share their expertise. Guests also got the opportunity to tour some of the RGU faculties. Before the group was brought back together for some presentations. S1 pupils received a certificate and a Northern Lights hoodie. S2 pupils who had completed the program received a scroll and a Northern Lights Class of 2016 pen.IMG_0097

British Science Week

Friday 11th March – Friday 18th March is British Science week.

On Wednesday 16th March the library will be transformed in to an experiment zone with a number of hands on experiments available from cup and string telephones to elephant’s toothpaste. Every pupil who comes to the library will be given a raffle ticket, a winning ticket will be selected at 1.30pm and the lucky pupil with the ticket will win a Science prize.

A number of S1 pupils will attend evening workshops at RGU with a variety of themes including Making Ice Cream with Chemistry and DNA taster.

There is also a number of activities available across Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire.

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Go4SET Success

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For the second year running Northfield Academy has won a trophy in the Go4SET competition.

The Go4SET competition is for a team of S2 pupils. In November the team, Kacey Bruce, Kirsty Leslie, Hannah Milne, Lucia McDonald and Joshua Currie, attended a launch event where they participated in some team building activities and selected the challenge they would tackle. From November until February the team worked with Balfour Beatty to research the building materials, heating and energy supply for an eco classroom that they would like to see built at Northfield Academy. They also designed the classroom, built a model to represent their ideas, created posters to tell their story and wrote a report of their findings.

As part of the challenge each pupil completed enough research to achieve a Silver CREST award which is a nationally recognised award.

During the final on the 18th February the team presented to two judges as well as discussing their classroom with other pupils, teachers and visitors. The judging was very close this year but Northfield Academy were awarded the Teamwork Award as they had demonstrated an excellent team spirit.