News from the School
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Motivation Assembly
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Steve Brown, a former captain of the Great British Wheelchair Rugby Team, is a regular visitor to CCHSG. Recently he visited Years 11, 12 and 13 to give a motivation assembly. The Kent sportsman broke his neck in 2005 after falling from a balcony and was inspired to take up wheelchair rugby whilst recovering in Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Reports say that it was a motivational assembly with a series of small group mentoring sessions and he was using his sports coaching abilities to help students into the right frame of mind for their exams. He talked about how he overcame adversity by having the right frame of mind and believing he could do it. The students loved it and were inspired by meeting him.
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CCHS Royal Society Worm Project
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CCHS Biology Department have a prestigious Royal Society Schools Partnership Grant in conjunction with scientists at Babraham Institute, Cambridge. During the spring term Sixth Form Biology students were investigating the response of C.elegans, a microscopic nematode worm, to a short heat shock and how this changes their body. They managed to replicate the results that Babraham has shown; this is a protective response involving proteins to limit the damage to the worm. The next part involved investigating whether this response is inherited through subsequent generations, although no changes to the worms DNA occur, so this would be epigenetic inheritance. Our results showed that the stress response was not inherited, although they are repeating the experiment, as all good scientists do, to check it is repeatable. They are now on to the third phase of the project involving students throughout the school with environmental sampling, as C. elegans is naturally found in the soil.
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