Clevedon School students helped by PB funding

Due to the generous donation received from PB Design we have been able to do the following:

Take 14 year 8 girls and 1 year 10 girl to see The Ada Show (www.adatheshow.com) at The Red Maids’ High School in Bristol. This show is about the story of Ada Lovelace in an interactive show which is a one-woman show. The actress playing Ada Lovelace wears a dress that is covered in array of thousands of LEDs used as a display and gloves which she uses to control sound and light for the show.

The show began with the actress wearing just a t-shirt and leggings but with a laptop strapped behind her. She then got dressed into her interactive-Victorian costume in front of us while describing both the high-tech dress and the fashion imposed on Victorian women. Once dressed she acted out the life of Ada Lovelace, explaining her work with Charles Babbage and how she wrote the world’s first computer program.

The show was very much enjoyed by all the girls who attended. When asked for comments they said:

“It was a really interesting show, I learnt facts about the amazing dress and about living in Victorian times as a woman as well as about Ada Lovelace.”

“I thought it was great how the actress changed her voice to represent the different characters.”
“We really enjoyed it and learnt lots about Ada Lovelace and her struggles during her life.”

“It was brilliant seeing the actress getting into that fantastic dress and how she had to be wired into all the equipment needed to make it work.”

Run a sixth-form visit to Bletchley Park home of the war effort to crack the Enigma and Lorenz codes. This was a one-day visit which allowed year 12 to gain a valuable insight into the wartime efforts of Alan Turing and his colleagues who cracked the Enigma code used by the Germans, Italians and Japenese (each with their own variants) to encrypt their military communications.

The visit allowed us to see the buildings (mainly the huts) where the decryption work took place, learn about the secrecy with which the work was carried out and gain an insight into what life must have been like for those who worked at Bletchley Park. We watched videos, listened to audio recordings of those who worked at BP and read masses of information boards about the way the whole process worked. We also saw plenty of enigma machine and found out more about how they worked.

We also had time to visit the National Museum of Computing and saw a Tunny machine and a reconstruction of Colossus.

This day trip really put into context the history of computing and the driving forces behind the rapid developments in decryption of military communications.

Finally the funds you so generously gave have also allowed us to purchase a permanent Pro Licence for Brain Scape which we use in Computer Science (and across school) to generate flash card based revision packs for all year groups. The principle is that students are asked a question then click to see the answer and rate how well they feel they knew the answer. The questions they rate highly reappear less often while those they give a low rating to appear again more often. This reinforces the areas where they are weakest.