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2 NEWSDOVER TERM 2 2014/15

Your first day at school can be a real experience! But for most of us our

fears prove to be unnecessary. Nat Natassja Lauren Setiadji tells us about her first day at Dover International School.

Pulling into the driveway, I took in my surroundings as how a typical kid would do on their first day of school. Sporting my uniform with the school badge, I made my way to the senior block, nervous about meeting my class for the very first time.

Setting foot into the air-conditioned classroom, I was greeted by my homeroom teacher, Ms Small. She helped me to settle in, and I waited for the first bell to go.

We walked down to the Cooper Hall, where we began our senior singing. Lessons carried on. Everything went well, the pupils were friendly and before I knew it, it was lunch time. I had paid for the lunchbox a week before, so my friend showed me the table where different people’s meals were waiting to be collected. Mondays: chicken rice. Gobbling it all up, I took a little stroll around the school to have a feel of the school layout.3.00pm. The dismissal bell rang. Students packed their things as they hurried to catch the school bus home. I gathered my books and made my way back to my homeroom. Waving goodbye to my new friends, I dashed downstairs to where my parents were waiting, eager to fill them in with the details of my first day at Dover Court International School.

Contribute to the newspaper!

Send us your thoughts, comments, suggestions and games and you could see them featured in NewsDover. All entries must be appropri-ate for all audiences and must be handed to Mr McCarthy or Ms Small

By Natassja Lauren Setiadji, Year 7/EA39

NEWSDOVER TERM 2 2014/15 3

Do you have a favourite book? Yutong Wang tells about her favourite

read... the Billie B Brown book series.

If you like the Billie B Brown series you will love The Bad Butterfly. Billie starts a ballet class with her best friend Jack, she really wants to

be a popular ballerina and in her first ballet lesson their teacher lets the girls move around like dainty butterflies. She lets the boys move like fierce, stomping trolls: to catch the butterflies! Miss Dainty plays the piano. With her right hand, she plays a twinkly butterfly tune. With her left hand, she plays a deep stomping troll tune. Billie races around the room, flapping her arms. I love the way she sometimes accidently crashes into the other butterflies that get in her way, she is not as graceful as the teacher would like her to be!

One of my favourite parts is when Billie runs and she looks to see if Miss Dainty is watching. She wants Miss Dainty to see what a good butterfly she is but then –CRASH! Billie runs straight into the mirror! “Oh dear!” says Miss Dainty as she rushes over. “I think you’d better slow down, Billie! Are you all right?” Billie has banged her head.

It hurts a lot but Billie doesn’t want to cry in front of Miss Dainty. She sits down and rubs her head until the pain is gone. I think all fans of the series will enjoy this moment!

Billie is a very active and fun character. Later in the book, Billie climbed through a hole, which was in the fence around Jack’s garden. Billie saw Jack eating, but when Jack saw Billie outdoors, he quickly finished his dinner and went to welcome her. They started practising ballet. Billie ran through the air and crashed in to Jack’s Lego. Jack teaches her how to be a dainty butterfly, and Jack does well, he looks like a real butterfly. Billie is often surprisingly clever and has a super doo-per idea. Can you guess what they do?

The next afternoon, when they’ve finished their lunch, they go to ballet again. When they went inside the classroom the children were about to start work. Miss Dainty says, “Ok: join in!” “ We have another idea “ They both say “I move more like a stomping troll and Jack moves more like a beautiful butterfly, “ said Billie ”So we decided to change, ”said Jack “Ok, that’s fine, ”said Miss. Dainty, and they start the lesson. Of course this is not like any usual lesson! Especially with these two characters.

I have enjoyed this book very much. I love all the accidents Billie has, and how she carries on regardless. Other books in the series can be seen to the left.

Yutong Wang


Literacy is an extraordinary week at Dover Court

International School. Douglas Ramchandran finds out more...

Literacy Week is a week where we

do lots of fun things to do with

literacy. These things involve a

writing challenge, where you could

win a prize. There is also a dressing

up parade. You have to dress up as

your favourite book character from

any book of your choice.

Another thing, that is very important,

is the Oscars. It is where every class

votes for a favourite character or

author or book and at the assembly

it will announce which character,

author and so on won. Finally there

is a thing called D.E.A.R. It stands

for ‘Drop Everything And Read’.

Whatever subject you are in, you

stop whatever you’re doing and

start reading your chosen book.

The book I’m reading is called

Black Op by Tom Palmer. It is

about a group of thirteen year

old spies who go undercover and

play for the England football team

to stop a terrorist who is trying to

attack the professional England

team. They have a coach, who was

a former English player, and later

on betrays them and goes away

forever. The second book in the

series is called White Fear. It’s about

the squad being summoned to the

Arctic Circle to stop a criminal that

will make World War III happen. In

their mission they meet their former

coach from the last book. They also

figure out that the criminal likes the

USA football team, so they decide

to lose to them in the finals so they

can stop him from exploding the

bomb.

This book was really exciting and

there was lots of suspense. I would

recommend this to any reader who

really likes spies and action.

By Douglas Ramchandran

LITERACY


SUPER SMASH BROS 4THE 3DS VERSIONSuper smash bros for the 3ds is a game with almost all the Nintendo characters.

Super smash bros is a unique fighting game. Instead of lowering

someone’s health bar, you increase their damage percentage.

The only way to stop someone is to knock them off the stage. The higher their percentage the more they fly. There are multiple game modes but the main one is smash. You can play two types of games in smash, stock (where you have lives and the last player standing wins), and time (where you try to defeat as many people as possible while not dying). There are different game modes depending on which version you got but I’m doing the 3DS version so I’m going to do the 3DS game modes. The special two game modes in the 3DS version is smash run and streetsmash.

About Streetpass

Streetpass is a special thing that is only the 3DS has. When you walk past someone with a 3DS you get a streetpass. Streetpass works differently depending on the game you have. If you want to get a streetpass for a game, you have to meet someone with the game you have. You have three moves

in streetsmash, attack, block and counter. If you attack you can hold the button and do more damage. If you block an enemy attack and attack straight afterwards you do a powerful counter attack!

Since there are too many characters to list I decided to just list the new characters:

Little Mac

Little mac is from Punch Out and is amazing on the ground, but in the air he is almost useless.

Shulk

Shulk is my favourite character and has lots of different moves referencing his game...


The Rules Goal To correctly name the murderer, murder weapon, and murder location.

Setup Sort the cards by type and shuffle each pile face-down. Without looking, take one suspect card, one weapon card, and one room card, and slide them into the secret envelope. Shuffle the rest of the cards together, and deal them to the players until all cards are dealt. Place the murder weapons in rooms randomly, no more than one per room. Place the suspect tokens on the assigned starting squares.

Play On your turn, roll the dice, and move your playing piece that many spaces on the yellow squares.You can move through a doorway to enter a room, but this ends your movement.


Board games remain a popular favourite and now many exist in digital format. Cluedo is a game where players try to figure out the three main facts of a murder: the murderer, the location of the murder, and the murder weapon; characters run around a mansion and gather evidence

Kyle Mascarenhas investigates this traditional game...

You can’t move through a yellow space occupied by another player, but multiple players can be in the same room.

If you start your turn in a room with a secret passage, you can use the secret passage instead of rolling the dice. This will put your character in another room across the board, ending your move. Suggesting: If you end your move in a room, you get to make a suggestion. To do this, name a suspect, a murder weapon, and the room you just entered.

Once a suggestion is made, the cards in the secret envelope are checked and if the suggestion is correct then the player is correct.

Tips and Tricks: How to Win the Game!When you make a suggestion, your goal is to get more information. If your opponents can show you the same card you’ve already seen, then you get no new information, and your turn is over.

The only cards that you have already marked off on your list that you should still ask about are your own cards, since nobody else will know about them.You can only make suggestions in rooms, if someone suggests you and drags you to a new room: make a suggestion there on your next turn.


Do you love Pokemon? Jack Griffin finds out more in this awesome article…..

I love Pokemon. Be it a game, a spin off series or the anime: it’s certainly one of my favourite franchises! Every single game has brought something new, like a phone, the physical/special move split, reusable TMs, and most importantly, the new Pokemon. The new Pokemon X and Y games sold 100 million copies in the first two weeks. Well, people really liked these games! I got Y version for my birthday, and I loved every bit of it. But now that I look back on it, I found a few things that weren’t as good as I thought. So, was Gen 6 of Pokemon hit or miss? Let’s find out…

New features

Pokemon Gen 6 introduced quite a lot of new, awesome stuff. My favourites are the things you can do on the bottom screen. The Player Search System is basically a grab bag of online features that allows you to find random people online faster than Usain Bolt can run. Pokemon Amie lets you play with your

Pokemon to raise their happiness and help

them level up faster and Super Training can help your Pokemon get insanely strong without having to go through the trouble of battling. Another small, but cool feature, is the ability to change how your character looks. You can go to barber shops or clothes shops. This can also affect how people talk to you or the price of things like stones or medicine.

Amazing quality

Pokemon X and Y not only plays well, but it looks amazing! The game plays in 3D and the landmarks like Prism Tower and the Shalour City Tower of Mastery look amazing too. But that’s only the start. Wait until you see the graphics of the battling.

One word: WOW! I’ve seen good graphics before on a console like the Xbox, but on a handheld!? The second I saw this quality, my mind literally exploded into a million pieces! Boom! So we’ve talked about how amazing the little things are. Let’s get to the game itself.

The battling

About 90% of any Pokemon game

is all about the battling. This is one of my favourite parts of any Pokemon game. Combined with the amazing graphics I’ve had fun with every Pokemon battle ever. In every Pokemon game your goal is to beat all the gyms, beat the Pokemon League, beat the Elite Four, beat the champion, and beat the game. In X and Y, I beat the game faster than you can say “Pikachu!”. I mean seriously? This game can be beaten in less than three days. The gym leaders specialise in some of the most beatable Pokemon types in the game. The only battle I had trouble with was Elite Four Siebold. He had great defence and offense and he could cover his weaknesses pretty well. So on reflection: yeah, this game was pretty easy to beat!

The Pokemon

Pokemon Gen 6 has brought some great things, here and there, but what’s the best thing about any Pokemon game? The new Pokemon.


Gen 6 only brought 69 new Pokemon. When I looked at the new Pokemon online and it said 69 Pokemon were introduced, I said to myself “69? That can’t be right. They’re probably still in development.” Well, turns out there are only 69 new Pokemon. But: these are some of the most creative Pokemon ever! An inverted squid thing, an avian luchador and a ninja frog were put into the game. The guys at Game Freak really have put their imagination into this!

The characters

There are a lot of characters in the Pokemon series I really like and ones that I find interesting. My favourite characters from the Pokemon series include: Blue, Barry, Steven, Cynthia, Wallace, and Wally. In Pokemon X and Y, there weren’t that many interesting characters in the stoy. Most of them you either barely knew, or just thought they were annoying. The rival trainer is good, the professor is…okay, and the villain team is just…well, you can decide. The only character I sort of liked was the main villain, Lysander. He’s not really my favourite

Pokemon villain but he is still one of the only interesting characters in the story. The other characters aren’t even strong trainers - as I have mentioned when I talked about the battling above. What makes a character interesting? Well, if they do something that was relevant to the story that’s okay, but if they don’t really have a personality: they’re not very interesting.

Changes to Pokemon

Gen 6 introduced the new fairy type. Nice stuff with the sparkles! The new type is one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen, and it even helps to balance the types. It gives poison and steel types an advantage, and anything that counters dragon type is something I definitely want on my team!

But there’s another change that happened to Pokemon, and it’s quite possibly the greatest fan service I have ever seen... MEGA EVOLUTION!

Look at this. LOOK! This is the best thing I have ever seen in Pokemon! It’s an awesome way to finish off

your opponent! These Pokemon look amazing! Mega Charizard X (right) is an excellent sweeper, Mega Aggron is bulkier than Shuckle, Mega Mawile’s attack is off the charts, and Mega Gallade (left) also looks awesome!!! I will admit, these new Mega Evolutions are unbalanced, but who cares? They’re just plain, you guessed it: awesome!

Overall thoughts

So that’s everything I have to say about X and Y! Was it a hit or a miss? Well, I’d say it’s a little bit more of a hit than a miss. There are some good and bad things in this game. I have to say my favourite part was the new Pokemon introduced, including the Fairy types and the Mega evolutions. I can also say that the remakes of Ruby and Sapphire: Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, were actually a little bit better than X and Y, but that’s another story. Well, this is the end of my review. I hope I get to share my opinion with you another time!

Jack Griffin


at Dover Court International School has

become a huge success. Boys, well it is

mainly boys, have been bringing cards to

school and playing with them and doing

cards tricks.

Michiel Olieslaggers finds out why this

old-school favourite has found a sudden

come back...

History

The history of cards started in China and spread to India and Persia - from Persia to Egypt, from Egypt it went to Italy and then Spain (called Iberia at that time). Most cards at that time were hand painted which meant they were very expensive.A playing card is a piece of specially prepared

heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic, marked with distinguishing motifs and used as one of a set for playing card games. Playing cards are typically palm-sized for convenient handling.

A complete set of cards is called a pack (UK English), deck (US English), or set (Universal), and the subset of cards held at one time by a player during a game is commonly called a hand. A pack of cards may be used for playing a variety of card games, with varying elements of skill and chance, some of which are played for money. Playing cards are also used for illusions, cardistry, building card structures, cartomancy and memory sport.

The front (or ‘face’) of each card carries markings that distinguish it from the other cards in the pack and determine its use under the rules of the game being played. The back of each card is identical for all cards in any particular pack, and usually of a single colour or formalised design.


The ‘Final Three Trick’ is an easy card trick to learn. Here is a quick tutorial to do the trick, and impress your friends. Right, go and get your cards ready to use them!

Step 1 Tell the spectator to pick 3 cards and tell them to memorise it. (Maybe you can give a paper for them to write on so they can memorise it easier).

Step 2 Now make 4 piles, the first one will have 10 cards the second and third will both have 15 cards and the remaining pile will have 9 cards.

Step 3 Tell the spectator to put 1 of the cards on one of the piles and take a part of the second pile. Do the same for the next pile. For the last pile you tell the spectator to put the last card on the third deck and take the remaining 9 cards and put it on top.

Step 4 Take 4 cards and move them to the back of the deck.

Step 5 Flip one card so that it is facing upwards like this. And flip one card so that it is facing downwards like this. Keep on doing this until the deck is divided into two equal parts. Then take the facing downwards cards and do it again until you only have three cards left which are the cards that the spectator chose.

For a YouTube tutorial about this, visit the link below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLjEulT6ssM

This is another card trick called 26 cards. This is an easy card trick. It requires no setup. This is a mathematical trick.

Step 1 Tell the spectator that you’re going to count off 26 cards (facing up). Remember the 7th card you count off and then continue until you count off 26 cards and put the cards on the bottom of the deck.

Step 2 Turn over 1 card so it’s faced up and add the remaining amount of cards until you reach 10. For example you have a 3 so you go 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and

10 (facing down). You do this 3 times.

Step 3 Then add up all the face up cards for example 3+4+6=13 so you count down 12 cards and the 13th card is the 7th card you remembered when you were counting down 26 cards.

Note King, Queen, Jack and Ace are all counting as a ten. Here is a YouTube link (sorry for the bad quality).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Dv1KvNcKE

This card trick is very easy but it requires some setup. This might be one of the best card tricks to start with.

Preparation Take out all the queens and one card you like. Put one queen on the top and the bottom of the deck. Take out all the jokers as well. Put one on the 25th place and put one on the 26th place. Put the card you chose between the 2 queens in the middle and turn it face up.

Step 1 Tell the spectator that you are going to riffle the deck and when they say stop, you will take out the card where your riffle ends (go quickly through the top half of the deck so that their card will be in the bottom half of the deck)

Step 2 Place the spectator’s card on top of the deck and take a part of the bottom half of the deck and place it on top of the spectator’s card.

Step 3 Divide the deck in half and lay the 2 piles next to each other. Count the cards off, one card per pile, until you reach your facing up card. Turn the card that is next to your facing up card around and it will be the spectator’s card.

Special Effect Turn the 4 cards which surround your facing up card and the spectator’s card and they will be the 4 queens.

For a video about this card trick, visit the link below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP62ItKghhM


Are you game? We all know this game, and that is now popular

with children and adults all around the world. It has come to replace the old ‘flip a coin’ routine to decide on who initiates anything from a school debate to a game of football. Natassja Setiadji finds out some interesting facts about the game…

We all know this classic game, but did you know it has a trick to it? People are not good at being ‘random’ or predictive. If you’ve just won with paper then you’re more likely to use paper in the next round. But if you’ve just lost with them, you’re more likely to immediately change weapon.

Surveys have shown that most male players throw rock at their first go, mainly because it is the manliest of the moves.

According to a 2011 British study, we tend to copy each other. Psychologists worked with thousands of people in RPS trials. In some, only one player was blindfolded.Those who could not see won the majority of games!

Moral of the story: wear a blindfold whenever you play a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Natassja Setiadji

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