On the 2^nd of November 2019, Year 12 and 13 students attended talks around the topic of “Computer Science in Action”. This included lectures that demonstrated the leading edge of computer science today, such as conversations about artificial intelligence and programs used in animation. The day also contained tips to help us with our examinations.

Five well-known and celebrated computer scientists from the field of Computer Science came to deliver these lectures, crossing the boundary between information and entertainment. Jon Macey spoke about the computer science behind animation technology, which not only involves a deep understanding of languages like Python, but also elements of physics such as the springs. He spoke about how cloth in animation technology is defined via virtual springs in the fabric.

Finally, Matthew Scroggs talked about his computer MENACE, made from matchboxes; designed to play noughts and crosses. Each matchbox was filled with coloured beads, each representing a different move that the machine could play. It used a version of machine learning in order to improve its playing. Lectures such as these created an inspiring day filled with eye-opening careers that one could take in the field of computer science.

Abhishek Dey

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.

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.

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.