Fascinating STEM Activity Week
Our Beacon Community have been celebrating STEM Week this week. They have been fully immersed in a range of fascinating activities, workshops, puzzles, challenges, competitions and shows relating to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Happy Puzzle Company Visit
Kickstarting our week was none other than the Happy Puzzle Company! We were thrilled to welcome the UK’s market leaders in providing family puzzles and games to host a challenging skills and Maths workshop. Our boys in Years 1, 3, 5 and 7 all took part in a range of challenges, which required them to work collaboratively in small teams to find a solution. The boys really tested their perseverance and ability to communicate effectively with each other in order to overcome each problem. They all did a fantastic job!
Year 8 Trip to Bletchley Park
Our Year 8 boys had the opportunity to visit one of Britain’s most historic STEM sites, Bletchley Park, which is famous for being the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War.
The day started with a tour around the site, learning about the 9000 people that worked at the site in its peak and how 75% of them were women. They gained a good understanding of the scale of operation and also the work conditions that they might have experienced in the famous Hut 3, 6 & 8, the home of Alan Turing. All the boys then participated in a code and cipher breaking session, where they gain an understanding of the scale of the task the code breakers faced against the German Enigma machine. The phenomenal number of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different settings (nearly 159 quintillion) the Enigma machine created gave Turing the problem on how to crack the code. The answer was the BOMBE, one of the world’s first computers.
The session also provided the boys with a once in a lifetime opportunity to touch and press a key on an original Enigma machine! Overall, the trip allowed the boys to appreciate how far technology has come and the importance of STEM subjects to the world.
Year 2 Science Show
Year 2 were treated with several demonstrations in science as a part of this week’s STEM theme. They were shown a variety of things including colourful flames, the basis of how fireworks are made, screaming jelly babies and flammable bubbles! The boys all thoroughly enjoyed the experience and are looking forward to getting into more practical science lessons in a few years’ time.
Year 4 Chesham Maths Trail
Our Year 4 boys ventured to Chesham to complete a Maths Trail. Working in small groups, they were set various tasks at different locations along the High Street and in Lowndes Park, where they tested their skills with time calculations, Roman Numerals, shapes, arithmetic’s and estimations.
The boys engaged in some fantastic teamwork when completing these tasks and along the way enhanced their road safety skills.
Year 2 Maths Trail
Our Year 2 mathematicians roamed the school grounds trying different challenges set by our Year 8 boys, with the Year 8 boys supporting them.
Year 6 Land Yachts Challenge
Year 6 were given the challenge of designing and building land yachts. The yachts were to compete in races across the Sports Hall using only small handheld fans as a means of propulsion. They were introduced to what real life land yachts look like and given some advice on the pitfalls, mass and friction; they needed to look out for in their designs. The boys were then put into teams and given limited supplies and time to design, build and test their land yachts. There was a definite Scrapheap Challenge feel to proceedings!
Watching the boys work together to brainstorm and problem solve was impressive. Many of their initial designs had issues, but it was inspiring to see their resourcefulness and the innovative solutions they came up with. By race time every group had a land yacht ready to go on the start line. Though some performed better than others, the effort and teamwork shown by everyone was commendable.
A particular congratulations must go to our overall race winners; Team Golden Hinde consisting of Sahan L, James M, Joshua R and Mark Z. Well done, boys!
STEM Roadshow
One of our flagship events is the STEM Roadshow presented by Imperial College London in partnership with Oundle School and supported by the OPEN Learning Partnership. This year’s event brought Zap!
This fascinating sell-out event engaged the audience with live demonstrations, hosted by Scott Marley taking the audience through a wonderful journey of learning what electricity is, how lightning is formed and some amazing experiments with the Van Der Graaf generator and the human wire being some favourites. Everyone came away with a greater appreciation of one of our most important inventions!
Year 4 Coding with Lego
Recently, we’ve purchased brand-new Lego Spike kits, which are designed to help students develop their Python programming skills in a fun, hands-on way. Our Year 4 boys were keen to try these out and started off by learning to code the motors, lights, colour sensor and gyro. They then followed the instructions to build a ‘Mini Mini-Golf’ hole. To do this, they needed to work out the correct coding for the club to hit the ball into the hole. Once they had succeeded with this, they become creative, adapting the course and the coding. Overall, the boys loved bringing their different concepts to life, and found this was a great, engaging way to learn.
Pi Day
Over the past couple weeks, our pupils were tasked to learn as many digits of Pi as they could and then recite it on Thursday as a part of our Pi competition. The winners from each year group selected a teacher that they wanted to pie for International Pi Day. Our record this year was set by Milan in Year 4, memorising a staggering 178 digits! The teachers then gathered in front of our whole Beacon Community and took it on the chin (or more in the face really).
Year 7 Test Oobleck
Our Year 7 boys had an exciting Science lesson, where they created their own oobleck and put it to the test! Oobleck is a combination of cornstarch and water, which creates semi-solid and semi-liquid form, depending on how much pressure you apply to it.
The boys had a fantastic time testing its abilities in a range of different experiments. Some of these experiments included taking a bare-foot dip in the solution, and another included launching an egg in a bag filled with the substance off our balcony to see if it would crack. Two of the eggs in the experiment even survived the launch untouched from a two story height of our building!
The Jackie Gibson Maths Challenge
On Friday, we held the Gibson Maths Challenge, in memory of our colleague, Jackie Gibson. This is where 12 teams from different schools all competed against each other to win the coveted ‘laughing gnome’ trophy. We are thrilled to have one of our teams win the tournament, for the first time since 2018! Little Chalfont School and The Beacon A-Team were head-to-head finalists, but The Beacon won a nail-biting tie-breaking round. Huge congratulations to all the schools who attended and took part.
