Patana News Volume 19 Issue 32

Our mission is to ensure that students of different nationalities grow to their full potential as independent learners in a caring British international community.

NEWS Patana

Friday 2nd June 2017

Volume 19 Issue 32

www.patana.ac.th

Getting Ready for Waste Less Week Page 2

Also in this issue

2017/18

Secondary Students Give Back / FOBISIA Coding Champions / The Roar

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

Bangkok Patana is an IB World School, accredited by CIS and NEASC

1

Getting Ready For Waste Less Week Article by Yu Rim Hong (Year 12), with contributions from Primary S.E.C. members

T

he Student Environmental Committee would like to announce that Waste Less Week 2 (WLW2) is coming up quickly. From 12th - 16th June, Waste Less Week is organised by the Student Environmental Committee to raise environmental awareness. We will introduce a number of student-led activities to help make our school more environmentally responsible.

The following are brief summaries of the changes we can expect to experience during the upcoming WLW2, and building on last year’s success, we value your support with these.

Saving Energy

• We plan to change the thermostats to 24 degrees in each classroom at the start of every day, to help reach a manageable but efficient temperature before classes arrive. This should avoid the need for classes to set the units to the maximum fan and minimum temperature just as classes are getting underway.

• We will check the thermostat at the very end of the day to see any changes in temperature from the initial 24 degrees – we are trying to find an optimal temperature that reduces our electricity usage.

• We will experiment with reducing AC usage in some of the shared areas in the school.

• We will promote ‘natural-lighting’ lessons – as trialled for Earth Hour recently, we hope that some of our lessons will be carried out without electric lighting.

We think these changes are practical ‘baby’ steps to help us all to honour our school’s 2041 commitment.

Better Recycling

• We will promote usage of the new recycling centre just outside the front of school.

• There will be brand new recycling bins next to the snack bars.

• In Secondary, House recycling bins will be placed between the Noodle Bar and Snack Bar.

2

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

Planting Seedlings

The Secondary Community Garden and Primary Biodiversity teams are planning to host a three day event where people can come to their stalls outside the Year 3 and 4 block and in the Secondary Lounge. They will invite people to plant seedlings in recycled bottles. To help with this, they would like people to bring their used plastic bottles to the advertised areas where we will have boxes, such that bottles can be upcycled.

Reusable Bottles and Cups

As part of Waste Less Week, Project Refill would like to encourage students and staff to use their reusable water bottles or reusable cups at school each day to reduce the environmental impact we make and help shape good habits.

Paper Straws

Where straws are used at snack bars and smoothie bars, we will introduce biodegradable paper straws.

Plastic straws do not degrade and have caused untold damage in the ecosystem.

Primary Residential T-Shirts

We will be encouraging Key Stage 2 students to recycle their Residential T-Shirts with collection points at advertised locations.

Trialling Milk Dispensers in Some Parts of the School

We are planning a new system of delivering the milk to students at break time during Waste Less Week in the Secondary Canteen, the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, eliminating the small, throwaway plastic milk bottles. Instead, larger milk dispensers will be available, and students will have reusable cups.

We hope these changes will help us all to consider our own environmental impacts and choose more sustainable options. We would like to thank the entire community for their ongoing support with these student-led initiatives. These small changes embody one of our core school values: we are ‘inspired to improve global sustainability’.

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

3

Year 11 Students Give Back L Loes Rijnders (11C)

ast Sunday, we invited some children from a little school in Khlong Toey to enjoy the Early Years playground and to give them an opportunity to do activities they cannot do in their own environment.

These children live in the slums and therefore do not have the facilities we have at Bangkok Patana, making this a very special day for them.

First, we took them to the Early Years playground where they had a great time going down the slides, playing in the sand pit, using the building blocks and riding the tricycles around the playground. Afterwards, we went to the Youth Club where we did some crafting and also used some of the equipment to play pool and air hockey, which they really liked! Overall, it was a very fun day and the children had a great time filled with excitement!

“This visit was completely organised

by Loes and her friends, even though they are mid way through their exams!

A great example of Global Citizenship in action!�

Caroline Ferguson, CAS Coordinator 4

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

8th Dan Yacapaca Badge Matt Baker, Head of Science Faculty

O

nline assessment tools are a great way to support independent learning and these tools are being used with increasing frequency as our feedback and assessment is evolving to be more refined and using new technologies. There are a host of different online assessment platforms but IGCSE and IB Science students frequently use the Yacapaca platform to test their knowledge and understanding.

Students answer questions online and receive instant feedback on whether they've answered correctly or not. If an incorrect answer is given then students receive a hint that is specifically tailored to challenge the misunderstanding behind their incorrect response. Students are then given further attempts at the quiz so that they can keep improving their scores until they can demonstrate mastery of the subject matter.

Yacapaca also provides feedback to the teacher regarding the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student and helps to inform our lesson planning so we can tailor curriculum time to meet the needs of each of our students.

Beatrice Wongsanguan, recently became the first person in the world to earn enough points for the 8th Dan Smiley lapel badge.

One feature of Yacapaca is that students accumulate points which they can exchange for avatars or lapel badges. Beatrice Wongsanguan, a Year 11 student who studies IGCSE Physics, recently became the first person in the world to earn enough points for the 8th Dan Smiley lapel badge. This represents a huge amount of work and a consistently sustained effort by Beatrice to excel in her learning of Physics. Beatrice was presented with her badge

by Mr Baker, Head of the Science Faculty.

Well done, Beatrice – keep up the good work!

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

5

FOBISIA Creative Coding Champions Peter Howe, Leader of Learning ICT and Amanda Ljunberg (6C)

T

his year’s FOBISIA Creative Coding challenge competition was hosted by St. Andrew’s International School, Bangkok and was open to all students in Key Stages 2. The focus for this year’s challenge centred on highlighting and promoting the benefits of teamwork in software development, as a means of improving and developing greater efficiency, creativity, innovation and the sharing of knowledge and experience.

The theme for the challenge was SPACE and any interpretation of the word was acceptable. All enteries were judged on the criteria below:

Pete Howe, Primary ICT Leader of Learning, timetabled a creative coding ECA to run in Blocks 2 and 3 and invited anyone in Key Stage 2 to apply. Quite a number of students joined and whilst some, who were new to the Scratch software we were using, learnt how to code, a team of six more advanced users formed who wished to enter the competition.

Development team name: mp_ Development team members: Amanda Ljungberg (6C) Tee Janvatanavit (6W) Nainoi Lauvoravit (6C) Tanya Sastrasinh (6W) Sarisa Techasukij (6A) Tye Chokephaibulkit (6W) 6

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

Mr Howe’s input was extremely limited after that. He talked the team through the rules and then had an initial discussion about what they thought the judges were looking for. He organised any resources the team requested and left them to it! Team leader, Amanda, will talk you through their journey to victory: “The six of us, mutual friends or acquaintances at least, decided to form a team from the first ECA lesson.

All of us had at least one years’ worth of experience on Scratch, though we all had different strengths. We took that into account and divided the work into three parts: coding, art/animation and music composition.

From the start, we wanted to do something unusual, something unique that would stand out against the other entries. When you hear the word ‘space’ you think of galaxies, astronauts, planets and stars so we decided to take a completely different approach: hence the birth of Empty Space.

Having competed in FOBISIA coding once before in Year 4, I knew that the weekly hour ECA lessons would not be enough for us to complete a game. We decided to create a Skype group and spoke to each other regularly, partaking in meetings to move forward with the game.

As we proceeded through the long, tedious process that is making a game, the storyline went through various adaptions. Chunks of code were lost due to saving failures, soundtracks were either too basic to use or too complex to produce, and hard-worked animations had to be redone several times over. Sometimes whole weekends were spent calling each other and playing through the game, doing the same drawings over and over again. Eventually, though, we decided on a final story that we were all happy to work with.

The story of Empty Space is set in a dystopian future where Earth has been infected by a deadly gas, making the skies rain toxic, turning the planet’s inhabitants into heartless mutants. The survivors found several hollows scattered across the world protected by magic and called them empty spaces. After harnessing the magic of the empty spaces and inserting it into portable objects to always be safe from the toxic rain, the survivors went to war with the mutants. No warriors survived the battle. The player is able to play as a mysterious young boy who is still alive afterwards; trying to get to the last, empty space before the magic protecting him runs out.

When we finally finished the game, we were relieved, and knew that even if we didn’t win the competition, we could still take pride in the fact that we had created a game together successfully, and had gained experience in teamwork, problem-solving and hard work under pressure. Besides that, we had all become close friends and had a lot of fun doing the ECA. Learning that our game won was a surprise to all of us, which makes the feeling even better. We’d like to thank our teachers, friends and parents for the support, and hopefully we’ll be able to compete again next year.”

The judges were unanimous in their decision. You can play the team’s winning entry, Empy Space here.

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

7

CATs Corner Tania Leyland, Community Services Coordinator

T

he new teams are in the process of organising themselves and making plans for next academic year.

Many of the core team members have been involved with their individual CAT over the past 12 months but some are new and have been inspired to take action as a result of the awesome events and campaigns that have taken place this year. The outgoing presidents have left behind their legacy, reflections, reviews and advice, and as they move onto new challenges I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of their thoughts and words of wisdom.

What skills have you developed?

Organisation - I have had to make sure I had planned all my meetings well in advance so that we don't waste time during the meeting. I always made notes on my phone so that I didn't forget.

My resilience and accountability was developed when we organised the 'change collection' for World Food Day. This project really made me understand the responsibility I hold as President, because as our project involved collecting money I had to comprehend the consequences that could occur if any of the money went missing. My resilience developed because at the beginning of the week when we began collecting the money we quickly came across lots of problems, but as we had a deadline I made sure to fix them quickly in order to keep the project going.

As there were many tasks to do, I would Time management and delegation - the stalls were successful due to our skills in have to divide my time into sections to dividing up the labor, managing time and do each task while balancing my other delegation of different facets of running commitments. Due to the large number campaigns (brainstorming, PR, running of tasks for the event, I have had to the stall, cleaning up etc). delegate and trust other people with Empathy - interviewing urban refugees directly for their personal desires and needs. doing the tasks.

8

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

Communication - I have become much better than I previously was. This still needs a lot more work but comparatively, I have become more confident in speaking to a group of people.

Organisation - planning meetings each week. I had to make sure that I had something to discuss and talk about with all the members, and have something for them to do as opposed to them just coming in and sitting there.

I would usually plan meetings based on what events were coming up and delegate tasks to the board members so that they could lead groups.

What piece of advice do you give to the new teams?

Encourage a laissez-faire approach, which encourages members to take on groups and projects as they will be rewarded and recognised - THIS is the way to keep them engaged.

Manage your time wisely!

Spread out the workload and make full use of everyone in the group - most people want to get involved but are just not sure of how to do so.

Plan well in advance and plan wisely. You don't need lots of publicity events done hastily, but rather a few done very carefully and successfully.

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

9

Athlete of the Week Mel Purich Dhiranusornkit // Year 9 From May 24th – 27th, the International Ice Hockey Tournament ‘Bangkok Fly 2017’ was held at the Rink Ice Arena, Central Rama 9.

Led by Mel in Year 9, the Grizzly Bears team (Thai Team) won the Under 14 Championship defeating three other Thai Teams, a team from Singapore and a team from Malaysia.

Siam Sports posted a news clip about the event on their page which can be found here.

Keep up with the action...

10

@bps_athletics _council

@BPSSPORTS

@BPSSPORTS

Tiger Sports Teams

Bangkok Patana School News

Coming up

SUMMER!!!!!

Make sure you stay in shape with some of our “Workout of the Week” posts posted on our Instagram page every week!!

02/06/2017

SPORTS AWARDS 2017

SOME PHOTOS FROM THE ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF SPORTS AT BANGKOK PATANA SCHOOL click here for the full gallery

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

11

12

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

University Visits Careers and University Faculty University / College Durham University Webster University

Representative Dr Ian Whitfield Natchayaa Weerawat

Location SEC302 2nd Floor, Senior Studies

Date 05.06.17 15.06.17

Time 12:15 12:15

International Day 2017/18 International Day 2017/18 is approaching! Please join us on Tuesday 7th June, from 7:45am - 8.15am in the PTG Room, for an informal briefing for Country Reps and anyone who is interested in hearing more about International Day. Please email ptgintlday@gmail.com if you have any queries or if I can be of any assistance and thank you for your ongoing support of International Day. Kind regards, Katherine Johns International Day Coordinator

School Shop Opening times during the school holidays.

The School Shop will be closed from Monday 3rd – Monday 31st July 2017. It will reopen on Tuesday 1st August.

To beat the queues in August, you can buy your uniforms for the next school year now.

Please see Khun Duang or Khun Ying in the School Shop who will help you select what you need.

Please note that the Post Office service within the School Shop will be closed from Monday 26th July until Thursday 31st August and will reopen on Friday 1st September 2017.

click here for the Canteen

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

Menu

13

Royal Rainmaking Exhibition T

o commemorate the 62nd anniversary of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s “Royal Rainmaking” project, Bangkok Patana school has organised and created an exhibition recognising his initiatives and development of rainmaking technology. Often refered to as the “Father of Royal Rainmaking”, this project was vitally important to help people suffering from drought.

The exhibition is on now until 18th October 2017 in the Secondary Library.

14

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

#61 Summer Holidays

I

n preparation for the summer break, I recommend you read about and listen to these podcasts for leaners. They are conveniently listed by age group and perfect for a long journeys.

From the same Common Sense Media site there’s also a great list of tech-inspired-ideas for summer reading. Take a look for yourself.

Secondary Workshop: Parenting in a Digital World Date: Tuesday June 13th 2017 Time: 8.00 - 9.30am Location: Primary Hall

Please don’t forget to sign up for the Secondary parents workshop titled ‘Parenting in a Digital World’. The items we will be discussing, sharing advice on and supporting with, are listed below: - screen time & multitasking - gaming & other digital distractions - inappropriate content, contact, conduct - difficult conversations & family media contracts There’s an opportunity to suggest content for the meeting when you complete the RSVP here.

Brian Taylor Assistant Principal, Campus Curriculum Technology Integration

Transport Corner Weekly news from the Transport Department

Patana United - Key Stage 3 Concert – Tuesday 6th June Primary Concert – Thursday 8th June

Please note that transport home for all students participating in the above concerts will be cancelled on the day of the show. Please ensure you make private transport arrangements to take your child home after the concert finish time.

Don’t forget that if any siblings or friends will be joining to watch the concert that you will need to cancel their bus home too.

Thank you for your cooperation and enjoy the concerts!

Contact Us

The Transport Department’s direct phone number is 02 785 2470. The office is staffed from 6:00am 6:00pm Monday to Friday. You can also contact us via email at transport@patana.ac.th

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

15

Fulfil your potential with Bangkok Patana School Position Available: Social Media and Alumni Relations Coordinator The Social Media and Alumni Relations Coordinator is a newly created position, reporting into the Development, Alumni & Marketing Manager. We are looking for a dynamic and innovative individual to join the team and drive the School’s social and online media presence and enhance the school’s alumni programme to create a culture where alumni relations are an intrinsic part of the School’s fabric.

Key responsibilities will be split 60% on alumni relations and 40% on social media.

For complete details and full job description click here.

Skills and Experience: • • • • • • • • • • • •

Bachelor’s degree, preferably in Marketing and Communications or a related discipline.

Native or first language English speaker with strong interpersonal skills.

Solid experience of developing and implementing innovative social media campaigns through various communication channels in an international organization.

Previous experience with community or alumni engagement.

Event management experience.

Practical experience of design software and video editing (eg: InDesign, Adobe, Illustrator, Photoshop).

Project management skills with the ability to work autonomously and get projects delivered to time and to budget.

Analytical with a strong attention to detail in order to maintain quality data and produce meaningful “value add” reports for management.

Extensive knowledge of and experience with online community management and social media management best practice.

Content creation and curation. Ability to maintain a regular schedule of posts, coordinate with other writers and also have the ability to create content independently.

Consistently demonstrates high energy, a sense of urgency, decisiveness and the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment A self starter with the proven ability to work across different audiences, cultures and levels of experience

Applicants are invited to send their C.V. by Tuesday 13th June to: Talent Manager- HR Department, Bangkok Patana School, 643 La Salle Road, Sukhumvit 105, Bangna, Bangkok 10260 Tel: 02 785 2437 Email: hrdepartment@patana.ac.th Visit our website www.patana.ac.th Interviews will take place in English; short listed applicants only will be contacted.

16

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017

Community

ANAPANA MEDITATION COURSE FOR STUDENTS

Anapana (Mindfulness of breathing) teaches students improved concentration skills and enhances calmness of the mind. This technique helps to relieve anxiety and is very useful at exam time to calm those nerves, but also for everyday life.

The next Anapana course will be given on Sunday 18th June for students aged between 8-16 years.The course is completely free!

To enrol, please contact Eva Sophonpanich at evasophon@hotmail.com for all further information.

You may also find this site useful: www.children.dhamma.org/en/children/about-meditation.shtml

02/06/2017

Bangkok Patana School News

17

For daily updates, snapshots and news on life at school you can find us here...

643 Lasalle Road (Sukhumvit 105) Bangna, Bangkok 10260. THAILAND Tel: +66 (0) 2785 2200 Fax: +66 (0) 2785 2399 www.patana.ac.th Email: reception@patana.ac.th 18

Bangkok Patana School News

02/06/2017