G.A.T.E.W.A.Y.S at Bangkok Patana 2019

On the 5th and 6th of February 2019, students in both Year 7 and 8, were selected for G.A.T.E.W.A.Y.S., a gifted and talented workshop, that was held at Bangkok Patana.

Tuesday, 5th February 2019

“Speaking with power”,

Program 8: Bhudham, Ploytida, JL, Jan, Luke, Albert

Do you want to be a fantastic public speaker? Well, we just achieved that from this workshop. It is such a fascinating way for us, as students, to discover the secrets of an amazing speaker.

We learnt about how to be successful in public speaking and how to persuade the audience. It was really helpful and gave us the knowledge that we would need for making a speech. Normally, you wouldn’t see kids speaking in front of a large audience, but this workshop has given us the confidence and skills in order to do so.

Furthermore, we met a lot of new friends and learnt how to be community-minded towards each other, even though we had various interests, different origins and were from different schools as well. Therefore, we did this by starting the day off by interviewing our chosen partner (who had to be from a different school) and then made a quick “introduction” speech about them.

Once everyone had a go, our guide would give us utilitarian tips for improvements. He further introduced to us a brand new task to complete, which was to pick any issue in the world that we have a passion to solve and attempt to persuade the others within the room to help prevent the dilemma. At the end of the day, we presented each of our speeches. There were miscellaneous obstacles that were in our way, such as getting the structure correct and double checking that all the information was sufficient. Accordingly, we had to make a two minute speech which was to be planned and rehearsed in three hours! Each and every speech ran smoothly and the day ended with a total blast.

Bhudham: “I finally found a way to remove the portal of butterflies in my       stomach…”

Ploytida: “Although it was a pain in the back to plan it all, it was a really great experience and I learnt that ‘your voice is actually your instrument’ when it comes to public speaking.”

JL: “Public speaking has never been so complex for me. It is something that requires a lot of practice and effort to perfect. This opportunity gave me a taste of what it is like.”

Jan: “To be in a room filled with people you have never met before, and learn bit by bit about them was amazing. Overall, we all had a great time and learnt lots about public speaking.”

Luke: “It was a great experience for me to speak in front of a crowd, overall it was a good experience.”

“Games Among the Toroids”,

Program 7: Atty, Beacon, Ryutaro

Have you ever wanted to master the game of tic-tac-toe? Or have you ever wanted to become a master of geometry? This workshop was quite a unique one. We did things that we would’ve never been able to do in a normal lesson and we also had a lot of fun learning. First of all, we were given some shapes and we had to try and discover different combinations of making a square using the shapes. After that, we had to make as many cube nets as we could, using nothing but our brains. Next, we played and discovered different techniques for tic-tac-toe, and we even played it on a cylinder! Finally, we were given our hardest and final task: make a 3D shape known as a Stewart Toroid with nothing but scissors, masking tape, and our brains! We learnt a lot about strategies, geometry, and toroids. We had a lot of fun during this day.

Atty: “Building toroids was fun. I learned some important maths skills for shapes. I never knew Beacon was such a great handyman. Great lesson for geometry. I never knew tic-tac-toe was such a tactical game.”

Beacon: “My mental capabilities were tested as I furiously tried to cut out squares and triangles whilst Atty and I figured out where they went and taped them together as swiftly as we could. It was an amazing experience and we learnt a lot of new geometry skills.

Wednesday, 6th February 2019

“The Great Balthazar’s Amazing Bag of Tricks”,

Program 7: Bhudham, Ploytida, Luke, Sumo

This workshop is all about variegated tricks where we, as students, discovered the ‘magic’ as well as science behind it. The day started off with a simple balloon, which rung our minds to being energetic. Our guider, ‘Mr Simon’ (as he preferred us to call him that way), gave us some pretty straight forward background information about static energy. At the start, he showed us various ways of using a balloon to produce this. We then had a go at it, which was really mind-blowing. Even if time flew rapidly, we did  so many tricks such as: making bubbles inside a bubble, flipping a cup full of water (avoiding dripping it), with the revealing hidden trick, making water change shape, making a cork stand in the middle of a cup with water and so on and so forth over the day – amazing.

Bhudham: “The day started with an impressive experiment, as the day went on it just keep on getting better and better.”

Ploytida: “Overall, it was such phenomenal day as I learned how to pull a lot of new tricks out of my sleeves, along with extra time of science and it was really a spectacular way to get rid of all the worries in my head as well.”

Luke: “There were loads of experiments to do and I have never learned as much so quickly before, it was amazing.”