As part of our recent Citizenship Day Year 10 worked with the Police on raising awareness and education surrounding the issue of Knife Crime. Our Students were praised by the Police for their sensible, mature and intelligent approach to the topic. Please click on the video link to see a sample of the work produced by our Students – Mohsin Gandhi, Reedwan Ali and Ayyan Sattar of 10 Henry.

[KGVID width=”640″ height=”480″]https://www.handsworth.bham.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CitizenshipDay-AwarenessProject.mp4[/KGVID]

This term our sixth formers and I have attended both of the FREE maths lectures run by Birmingham University’s Maths department. The first entitled ‘Maths in the making of the modern world’ was of great interest to our students giving them an insight into where Maths can lead in terms of careers (for more info please see mathscareers.org.uk) and also the type of mathematics they can experience at university which is much broader than at A level.

The second lecture entitled ‘Pi, interstellar dust clouds, single pixel camera: some surprising uses of random numbers’ was a far more rigorous lecture which went into the detail of how high resolution images can be compressed to much smaller sizes and how surprisingly we can unpack a single pixel camera images to give us an image which is almost identical to that taken by the new Nokia Lumia 41 megapixel camera.

After Christmas there are 3 more lectures, please click here for more details.

Moodle

The maths moodle pages are constantly being updated for all year groups, these include important resources such as:

• Revision sheets to use before assessment tests for years 7-11
• Sample and past papers for GCSE
• The interactive GCSE test book

 

As well as our

• Maths Fun page

 

Maths Prizes

Three lucky HGS students will be receiving an Amazon voucher for Christmas!
In the maths department we have been giving any student who has received a merit a raffle ticket. At the end of term we will be drawing three winners who will receive £20, £15 or £10 amazon voucher.

If you miss out this term remember we start again for the spring term – so impress your teachers and start collecting your tickets.

Well done year 11s

Our top two sets sat their GCSE in November and will be receiving their results in January. For the first time at HGS we have students who will have top grades in GCSE Maths before the summer. These students are now working on Additional Maths which is a AS equivalent qualification. They will all have a great opportunity to take Maths far beyond GCSE and be successful at A level.

Lastly, a big thank you to our head teacher Mr Bird who despite pressure from government policy changes decided to keep this fantastic opportunity in place for our students. HGS boys have benefitted from an opportunity which is starting to be taken away from many other students across the country.

On Thursday 21st November, a group of our A2 Geographers (who will be studying Geography at university) accompanied Mr Bird to King Edward VI Five Ways School to attend the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Conference as part of Geography Awareness Week. We learnt about a variety of dynamic software which allows Geographers in all walks of life to decide where and when their resources are best deployed. We heard from a civil engineering from Atkins who was involved with the design and construction of the iconic Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, a geospatial intelligence analyst from West Midlands Police and a healthcare professional. We also heard from a speaker from Tyneside University which offers a ‘Geomatics’ course, specialising in GIS.

In summary, GIS is a bit like google earth with steroids, allowing all sorts of digital layers to be added onto maps – including imported data – which allows in depth, ‘real-time’ analysis of situations. For example, we used GIS to predict criminals’ thought patterns; to respond to a simulated outbreak of disease in the local area and we learnt about ‘crowdsourcing’: the practice of obtaining needed data or ideas by soliciting contributions from large groups of people.

Students relished the chance to talk informally to the professionals about their work and have some hands-on experience of the software. This really is the technology of the future, and one which students and staff alike found inspiring.

On the 25th of November we visited University of Birmingham for an evening lecture presented by Professor Robin May. His lecture was entitled “Pathogens and Disease” which gave us an insight into how our adaptive and innate immune system work to protect us. We learned how only 13% of our bacteria gets passed on when we shake hands and only 17% is shared between our left and right hand. He explained to us how impressive certain parasites are at adapting themselves in order to survive; toxoplasma is the biggest mind manipulating pathogen that lives inside rats. The parasite needs to get from the rat into a cat and it does this by manipulating the rats’ brain so that the rat hangs around the cats faeces. This increases the chances of the rat being eaten by a cat. Professor Robin May led a passionate lecture and involved all the students by throwing questions to the floor. We enjoyed the experience and this gave us an understanding of how university lectures are.

Tirhas Fetwi (13B) & Mariyam Mustafa (13N)

Darren Byfield (Aston Villa, Jamaica and Player/Coach at Tamworth) and Ruben Hazell (Aston Villa) visited Handsworth Grammar School recently and gave a presentation to Year 10 Assembly. They also visited the Computing and Multi Media department as they will be helping with the IT World Cup Competition. The visit was organised by Mr King to help inspire and motivate our Students and was a great success. In their presentation Darren and Ruben focussed upon the key Learning Habits of resilience, perseverance and developing transferrable skills. They were able to draw upon their own life experiences to illustrate their points. We are very grateful for their time and support.