Technology Through Time
As STEM week is upon us, Year 8 got the opportunity to visit one of Britain’s most historic STEM sites, Bletchley Park. This beautiful country house in Milton Keynes became 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 it’s 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 gained 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 life time opportunity to touch and press a key on an original Enigma machine!
Overall, the trip has allowed the boys to appreciate how far technology has come and the importance of STEM subjects to the world.
