Computing This year has limited, but not curtailed, our usual amazing stories of cups and awards and has been a remarkable year, not without its successes both inside and beyond the physical or virtual classroom. In October, we came away with a cup from the Lockheed Martin Cyber Quest Competition, which will be the last for our amazingly talented Upper Sixth. They were undoubtedly a unique cohort and it is sad to say goodbye to them without the parties and high spirits of ending their school career but they will live in my memory forever as champion cup winners! They have left their legacy at school, not just in my trophy cabinet! Sam Mearns was an inspiration to others to explore web technologies; he already has an amazing portfolio of professional jobs already under his belt and his legacy will live on in
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school with our intranet home page; he also fixed our sign on issue for Firefly and worked with Tom Milner to produce a Sixth Form registration App that only works in range of the GPS coordinates of the school. Not even Covid-19 held them back, and in fact lockdown yielded even more amazing products. Josh Coates’ Maths questions generator that is now in use by the Maths Department; he hopes to sell it commercially. All in addition to their projects required for A Level. I know I shall be hearing about their successes in the future but I will truly miss them. It is sad that our Fifth Years missed out on the opportunity to sit exams and show off their talents, but they instead had the opportunity to extend their knowledge by learning Java. Some students will benefit from this in their A Level by getting ahead
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and others, who are not taking the A Level, will go into their career with a valuable insight into this highly sought-after skill. Before lockdown the Second Years entered a competition to design an App for entry into a national Vodafone Digital Creator’s Challenge. One group of girls got into the national final with their proposal for an App called ‘Preggo’ to support woman through their pregnancy, combined with an additional piece of hardware to sense movement worn on a waistband to monitor contractions and alert when the time comes to call the hospital. Unfortunately, the final was cancelled and we await their judgement remotely. The usual coding competition for the First Years was cancelled so we adapted it to make a Scratch game
