There are loads of different activities taking place in the school through the term. Here is a selection of the some of the most recent ones. Check the archive tab for some of the past stories. Click on the links to go straight to the articles.

Intercultural Day & International Food Fair

Tech Circuit Award Winners

Valentino & Reinan

Champions

Valentino & David

What is the Dublin Tech Circuit (DTC)?

The Dublin Tech Circuit was created for schools to compete against each other in competitions. These competitions wouldn’t take part in the usual things like football or basketball, but would be in technological fields such as programming, robotics, 3d modelling etc. For the first time in Ireland’s history, schools would be competing NOT in sports but in technology.

What is a Tech Team?

A Tech Team is a group of students within a school, who compete against many different schools to win prizes. Think of it like a sports team - students compete against each other to earn a spot in the team, then train to compete against other schools' Tech Teams.

Setting up the Team & Preparations

The founding team, consisting of Valentino Alexandru, Valentino Valente, Leonardo Valente, Iris O’Connell, and Reinan Rosales, were tasked to establish a Tech Team in the school to be able to compete in the competition that was being planned. To gather people for the team, we went around to different classes to present the idea of the Tech Team to the school and find out how many students would be interested in it. After that, we sent out emails to the students to sign them up. We wanted to be able to hold trials for the students to compete for a spot in the team. For this, we needed a place to facilitate the trials and a teacher to supervise. After asking many teachers, Mr. Sherry was able to facilitate the trials in his Technology room.

In the trials, students competed against each other, answering a series of questions in which tested the students’ knowledge and creativity. In the end, 4 students remained victorious. Sam Churchard, David Szymon, Kamil Sobon, and Mustafa Saeed. These students, in addition to the founding team, created the Drimnagh Castle Tech Team.

Marian & The Event

Mr. Sherry organised transport for us to get to Marian College. We arrived at school early in the morning, just before 8:00 a.m., and arrived at Marian College at around 9:00 a.m. The Marian College staff and members of the DTC were great hosts and greeted us immediately as we arrived on the premises. The event itself was set up well using Marian College’s Physical Education Hall to facilitate all seven Tech Teams that had arrived from their respective schools to the event. There were few problems with the event, though the problems that came into factor were easy to overcome and some were even cleverly adapted into the event by the DTC members from Marian College running the event.

Task 1: Tower - Engineering

We were given a fixed amount of materials to use:

100 twines of spaghetti
50 meters of masking tape

The goal was to balance 40 marshmallows (inside of a muffin case) on top of our tower. We started off the construction with a parallelogram and made pyramid-like structures to expand. We also used our intelligence and perseverance (alongside triangulation) to build our tower higher and higher. We won the round with a height of 75cm. Our tower had been able to hold up another that fell.

Task 2: Robots - Innovation

We had to design an idea using three prompts, such as autonomous robots, drones, laser pointer, touch sensor, earthquake, tsunami etc.

This task was carried out by Iris O’Connell, Leonardo Valente, and Reinan Rosales. We had to make an autonomous robot that used a touch sensor to help against earthquakes. This robot would be used to warn those nearby about the earthquake and measure the magnitude of the earthquake. We called it H.E.A.S (Hydraulic Earthquake Autonomous Sensor).

Task 3: Car - Creativity

We had to make a car to transport a crayon box down a slope. We only had straws, lollipop sticks, tape and paperclips. Sam made the main body and the spoiler. Valentino Alexandru and David worked on the wheels. They made

them out of plastic straws and masking tape. We won with our F1-style car we made.

Award Ceremony

Due to all of our hard work, Drimnagh Castle’s Tech Team had won in a climactic ending. In the ceremony, we had won trophies, medals and t-shirts promoting the DTC, Ireland’s largest student community. The biggest award of them all was that we won the pride of being the victors of the first ever DTC event. In the end, we took many pictures of our hard work, and rested in good spirits, while enjoying pizza together!

Intercultural Day & International Food Fair

By Patrick Suarez

On the 9th of April the staff and students of Drimnagh Castle Secondary School celebrated International Food Culture Day. This event was part of the wider Diversity Week celebrations in 2025. Staff and students joined together to celebrate their heritage in food form. We celebrated the food and culture of many different regions, the Philippines, Spain, Argentina, Ireland, the United States, Peru, India, Asia, Africa and beyond. From Polish Pierogi and Philippine Adobo to Nigerian Jollof Rice and Indian Samosas, the event converted the school into a vibrant fusion of flavour and colour and scent. The occasion was as much a celebration of food as a means of learning and communicating the history and tradition of the foods associated with it, and the sharing of the cultural history and recipes by students as part of their food stalls. This day was made extra special by the attendance of the families of many of our students. All the food was home cooked and prepared. The students were joined by members of their extended families, many of whom went to great lengths to reproduce some of their native recipes and delicacies.

Thanks to the hard work of the teachers and students involved the day was a huge success. Students and staff members shared food and chatted about our different heritage with many students dressing up in their countries' traditional clothing. The mood was celebratory and full of laughter and music and personal exchange of experiences. In addition to the food on the platters, many students enjoyed telling others about their traditions and culture. The legacy of International Food Culture Day was that it brought our diverse school community together and showcased the range of food cultures from around the world.

Design Your Future City

Sustainable Leapcard Prototype

Brainstorming team

Hello, my name is Bien Rosales and I am a TY Student in Drimnagh Castle, and this is my experience in one of the programs I have taken part in during Transition Year.

I attended DYFC from October 14-18, and it consisted of many workshops that helped all of us understand how a Smart City works, and how we can make our own innovations to help make Dublin City a better place by fixing any sustainability issues.

The program started off with an introduction day for all the participants, so we could get to know each other. There was a Speculative Architecture workshop in which we were put into random groups and challenged to build a sustainable place on a different planet in the Solar System. These workshops would guide us on how to be able to make something that would fix a sustainable problem in our city, and it didn’t have to be realistic so creativity could be endless. It was great fun and very challenging. workshops such as the Biodiversity Tour, Water Walk, Ethics workshop, AI and Climate and Gamifications were all used to contribute to the problems. During breaks, I suggested that I bring UNO cards, so we pretty much played that game from Wednesday-Friday, which was really fun. At the end of each day (except Friday), we would make “Zines” for around 30 minutes, which we used to reflect on the things we did every day.

On the last day, we were split into different teams, and we all had to create an innovation that would solve a sustainable problem in our city. Our group decided to make a box with Leap Cards installed at the top of it with a built in translator, which would help foreigners/immigrants that come into Ireland with transportation around Dublin City Centre, it would be implemented onto Dublin Buses which could then be expanded onto different modes of transport, such as the Luas or the Dart. At the end of everyone's presentations, we all got a certificate to show our completion of the DYFC program.

We all had loads of fun, creativity, interesting creations, funny UNO games, met new and amazing people and so much more. This whole experience was definitely an unforgettable week for me.

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