Cyber Discovery Competition Success
Congratulations to seven of our year 12 Computer Science students who all scored maximum marks in the recent Cyber Discovery Challenge, a HM Government-funded extracurricular programme, turning teenagers into cyber security experts. This is an integral part of the UK’s national cyber security strategy and aims to develop the next generation of cyber professionals. They were selected from over 35,000 students to take part in the Cyber-Start complete bonus challenge, aiming to solve an online capture the flag competition. All students are working as hard as they can to reach the final stage of the competition, completing digital forensics, cryptography and binary exploitation tasks which are skills needed in a real-life cyber security expert’s job.
Oxford Computing Challenge Success
Congratulations to thirty-nine pupils who have qualified for the Oxford University Online Computing challenge to be held in March 2020. It is an invitation only event which aims to encourage pupils who achieved a top 10% score in the recent UK Oxford Bebras Challenge to develop their computational thinking skills further. Honourable mentions go to David Akinfemiwa, Arjun Salian and Sahat Chisti who achieved best across the school scores in the elite and intermediate categories of the competition. All students will be issued with certificates sent from Professor Peter Millican of Hertford College Oxford and preparations are already advancing to ensure success in the next round!
Sports Roundup
The Year 10 Football Team beat Tudor Grange 1-0 and are now through to the Quarter Finals of the Aston Villa Cup.
Both the Under 14 and Under 16 Badminton teams beat St. John Wall 6-0 and 6-0.
The Under 14 Football team beat Arena Academy 7-0 and are through to the semi- finals of the Aston Cup.
The Under 13 and Under 16 teams (both the A and B teams) won the English Schools Table Tennis Tournament and are now the Birmingham Champions as well as going through to the Regional finals.
The Sixth Form Football A team beat Camp Hill Boy’s 5-3 yesterday – a great victory!
Congratulations to all the teams involved.
Trussell Trust Foodbank
Every day people in the UK go hungry for reasons ranging from redundancy to receiving an unexpected bill on a low income. Trussell Trust Foodbanks provide a minimum of three days’ emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis in the UK and specifically in Birmingham.
Over 13 million people live below the poverty line in the UK.
Foodbanks feed some 1,200,000 people nationwide. Of those helped, approximately 500,000 are children.
At HGS we can do something to help, if every student in the school brings in just one item we will be able to donate more than a 1,000 items to the Trussell Trust’s FoodBank in Birmingham.
Tins and packets are the best items to donate. Please see the list below for ideas about what to donate.
| Milk (UHT or powdered) | Rice pudding (tinned) |
| Sugar (500g) | Tea Bags/instant coffee |
| Fruit juice (carton) | Instant mash potato |
| Soup | Rice/pasta |
| Pasta sauces | Tinned meat/fish |
| Sponge pudding (tinned) | Tinned fruit |
| Tomatoes (tinned) | Jam |
| Cereals | Biscuits or snack bars |
We will be collecting items as above from Monday 2nd December 2019 until Thursday 19th December 2019.
Please bring your donations to your Form Tutor or to Ms Brown in Room 3. Please give as generously as you can.
We can make a real difference and be a force for good by working together to help other people who are less fortunate than ourselves.
Thank you.
Inspirational Lectures for HGS Mathematicians
On Tuesday 12th November the Maths department took HGS Mathematicians to the Maths Inspirations lectures in Birmingham. Compère Matt Parker was the Maths writer on Dara O’Briain’s School of Hard Sums and has recently written Humble Pi which was 1st in the Sunday Times best seller list. He is an entertaining presenter and it would be worth looking at his YouTube channels: Numberphile and Stand up Maths.
The first talk was from Zoë Griffiths on Numbers in the News. She showed some interesting examples of the misuse of graphs by politicians. She also showed how misleading information in newspaper headlines can be and discussed the additional information needed to draw meaningful conclusions from the statistics in the headlines.
Nira Chamberlain uses his Maths to solve problems in the aerospace and automotive industries, his talk was titled: How Maths can save us from an AI apocalypse. He talked about the Maths techniques needed to construct a simulation. He concluded that businesses run using artificial intelligence will take over the financial world unless controls are put in place.
Ben Sparks, a mathematician and musician talked about his favourite spirals. He explained how to generate the simple spiral of Theodorus and then how to use complex numbers to generate the Mandelbrot set. His images of this produced wows from audience.
‘Global epidemic’ of childhood inactivity
Please read this important article on children’s physical exercise and health advice:
Cup Match Victory
The Under 14 Football team beat Archbishop Ilsley School 7-2 in their recent Cup game. They now proceed to the last 16 of the West Midlands Cup. Good luck!
Focus on Education
Are some GCSEs harder to do well in than others are? Yes, was the conclusion of Ofqual recently when the regulator announced the outcomes of research in to the relative difficulty of GCSE subjects. It found that French and German GCSEs had been more severely graded when compared to other GCSE subjects for a number of years. As a result, Ofqual will bring the grading of these subjects into line with other subjects from 2020, which on average may mean students achieve a quarter to half a grade higher than they might have done in the past. Whether this successfully arrests the ongoing decline in the number of students, taking these subjects remains to be seen. You can read more about this in an article published in the Times Educational Supplement – Times Educational Supplement.
Key Stage 3 Basketball Success
The Key stage 3 Basketball team beat Holte School 22-11 in their first match of the season on Friday evening. Congratulations on a sound start to the season.
