We are delighted to announce that Joseph Lee and Sebastian Fairhead (Y8) took second place in the British Computer Society’s Cyber Challenge for 2020.
The competition, to cultivate young computing leaders, was open to pupils across Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire, Luton Borough, Milton Keynes and Buckinghamshire over the summer term, and attracted over 300 entries.
For the challenge, the boys had to create an educational resource promoting the positive aspects of using online resources to learn, for school work and social interactions, but also to be careful to check if the information was true or false. Their resource had to encourage critical evaluation to get the best from online information and discard fake news. Each entry was judged on its creativity, selection and presentation of images and text, use of programming and the finished presentation in demonstrating improved learning outcomes.
The boys enthusiastically leapt at the cyber challenge, despite the issues that working apart brought during the summer lockdown. They told us, “We chose to use an online software called Scratch, which is block coding. It was fun, and we both enjoyed doing it. Even though we were faced with challenges such as working remotely / not next to each other, we still managed to solve all timing problems and had a good way of working. For instance, we sorted the jobs of writing the script, creating the characters, recording the script, and writing the different codes for each character. We both look forward to doing more coding and working together again when another task like this is available for us to do.”
The school has received a trophy from the British Computer Society and each boy was presented with his own individual trophy.
Technology
As a school, we recognise the importance of technology, not only to enhance the boys’ learning experience but also to provide them with the requisite skills for their futures. The need for technology clearly came to the fore this year with the COVID pandemic. We are pleased to say that the skills of boys and staff ensured a well-rounded and complete education continued even in lockdown and continues to develop now the boys are back at school. This term boys have engaged in a whole range of exciting technology-based initiatives. Y5 boys have been learning how to use internet browsers with ‘Welcome to the Web’ and they have been busy creating their own Weebly websites. The older boys in the Prep School have all been working on various forms of coding, with Y6 boys using Scratch block code building to make activities and basic games. Y7 boys are coding Microbits with the block editor and Pseudocode to create virtual pets and Y8 boys are working with Python Turtle library to draw shapes, patterns and scenes. Our Y3 boys also embraced technology to explore Ancient Egyptian pyramids, temples and artefacts using the school’s VR headsets.
