General

A massive Culloden Academy thank you to our former pupils Catriona Chambers and Dougie Brown who gave up their valuable time to speak to our S6 year group today.

Catriona has spent the majority of her career at SpaceX. Following her degrees in Engineering at Oxford and Princeton Universities, Catriona joined the small SpaceX avionics team in 2005 and stayed with the company until 2021. Catriona has held technical and leadership roles and was responsible for major architectural designs and decisions on the rockets and space capsules. Catriona’s latest project at SpaceX was Director of Starship Avionics which saw multiple rocket launches and landings of the new prototype vehicle. Catriona explained how SpaceX has been able to change the space industry in such a short time through their innovative design and willingness to make and learn from their mistakes. Catriona is currently part of Alpine Space Ventures.

Dougie is Event Producer for Belladrum Tartan Heart Music Festival. Dougie started a Music and Technology course at Leeds Met University but quickly realised this wasn’t for him. After gaining valuable work and gigging experience he completed a Community Arts Degree at Strathclyde University. He has held several prominent roles in the most important music events around Scotland including the following: Rock Ness; Wickerman; Loopallu; Groove; The Gathering and Go North. Like many others Dougie is saddened by the loss of The Ironworks which he helped to develop for over ten years. Dougie is Director for Into The Light Management Ltd. and has managed both Tamzene and now Katie Gregson-MacLeod https://www.katie-gregson-macleod.com/

Congratulations on your success Catriona and Dougie.

The S6 Young Enterprise Team ‘Unravel’ had a fantastic opportunity this week, when they had a visit from local PR company Whale-like-fish.

The pupils gained lots of valuable help and advice about how to launch and market their product – a mental health card game.

Huge thanks to Whale-like-fish for giving up their time and supporting the school.

The S6 Young Enterprise Team ‘Unravel’ are delighted to have not just one, but two Business Advisors!

Andrew MacKenzie (pictured here with some of the team) and Alison MacKenzie, are both from Johnston Carmichael chartered accountants and business advisers.

They visit regularly to advice and guide the team with their business.

We are extremely grateful to Andrew and Alison for supporting Young Enterprise, and our Culloden Academy pupils.

The Higher Business Management classes visited West Fraser Ltd this week.

Pupils received a tour of the factory, and saw Operations Management theory working in real-life business.

Huge thanks to West Fraser Ltd (especially the tour guides) for supporting the school.

To celebrate Maths Week Scotland 2023, the Maths department recently ran a Maths in the Wild Photography competition. To enter, pupils had to submit a photograph of something maths related that they had spotted when they were out with the classroom. The more creative, the better.

Lena Labno (S1) was the overall winner with an equilateral triangle in the school quad and the runner ups were Gabriella Ritchie (S6) with a flower from her garden showing the Fibonacci sequence/symmetry in nature and Toby Macrae (S4) with the Petronas Towers representing symmetry.

Well done to all entrants, there were some fantastic photographs sent in.

LifeScan hosted a maths based open day for some of our S3s last week. Students took part in lots of fun maths based activities, learned about diabetes and enjoyed a tour behind the scenes where they even met Saul and Hagen, two of the resident robot that roam the corridors.

Thank you to LifeScan for organising such a fantastic day.

Our National 5 Business Management classes had a great day visiting Johnstons of Elgin on Thursday where they received a tour of Operations and a presentation on the company’s Marketing activities. Pupils were all very enthusiastic about seeing aspects of their course in a real life business context. The trip was rounded off with a visit to the ever-popular McDonalds! Thank you to Johnstons of Elgin for having us, and to Miss Thomson in the Business Department for organising such an excellent learning opportunity for our pupils.

The latest edition of our Equalities Magazine is now available. Highlights in this edition include Dyslexia Awareness Month, World Mental Health Day, photos from the Photographic Competition, Book Reviews, and a Rights Respecting Interview with Mr Wilson.

Higher Politics went to Edinburgh on 13^th September to see The Rest is Politics podcast. To start off, pupils had a few hours of free time in Edinburgh to be tourists for the day and explore, shop and eat lots of good food! This was some of our pupils first time in Edinburgh so it was great to be able to offer them this experience. In the evening, we went to Usher Hall where the podcast was taking place. We were lucky enough to Meet Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart who were extremely welcoming and asked the pupils questions about politics. We met them on their stage and also got a great group photo – Mrs Gordon was possibly the most excited of us all! After this, we went and got our seats and watched the show, where the pupils were super engaged and involved in what was being discussed. The Rest is Politics does a Q+A session and 3 questions were answered that had been put forward by our Culloden Academy pupils which was fantastic – they will be able to use their responses in essays and their assignments. Not only this, but our school were given at least 2 shoutouts in front of a sell out audience of over 2000 people. We also are Twitter famous after Alastair posted our group photo on his twitter page!