Despite depleted numbers due to the storm, Saturday saw another set of successful faculty extension sessions (for academic scholars and invited others).
In a change to the billed programme, in the first hour the Year 7-9 pupils looked at the permutations and combinations of seating arrangements and considered different possible scenarios. They were working with the factorial notation (!) which was new to many of them. We learnt that for, a class of 15, a teacher has about a trillion different arrangements of the pupils to consider when they are writing their seating plans. Mrs Pawley was impressed with the engagement of the pupils and also their willingness to wear party hats!
For their second session, Years 7-9 visited The Covers for a Business Enterprise workshop. After a brief introduction to key business concepts such as USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) and Market Segmentation, the students were tasked with designing a new feature for Vivary Park. They were asked to present a proposal that incorporated the new business terminology they had learned. During their planning time, the groups considered various important factors, including planning permissions, the impact of their proposed features on stakeholders, and staying within a £150,000 budget. The students rose to the challenge, coming up with creative and innovative ideas, such as an underground tunnel system for children’s play, a karaoke zone for social media and music enthusiasts, and an axe-throwing area aimed at thrill-seeking adults. At the end of the session, the groups presented their ideas, and the class voted on the best proposal. The underground tunnel system was chosen as the most suitable addition to the park. Mrs Davey was impressed by the range of HPL skills and attitudes displayed during the group activity, including metacognition, creativity, empathy, and agility. The students demonstrated excellent teamwork and problem-solving abilities throughout the session.
For the Year 10s and 11s the day started with a session on Satire in the English Department. Having looked at the power of the satirical knife, they were tasked with creating their own piece, chosen from a range of topics and in whatever form they liked. Bea excelled with a thoughtfully penned article on the Western World’s materialistic exploitation of Christmas.
Their second hour took the students through a potted history of cryptography, leading to a practical demonstration of simple Caesar ciphers undertaken by a few lucky volunteers. From here they joined in with a discussion about the increased complexity of cryptography and hence, the difficulty in solving them. All of this led them to intuit frequency analysis as a way to crack more complex ciphers.That done, they competed to use these techniques to decrypt a paragraph of crypt text. Mr Proctor was pleased with the effort put in, even though few succeeded completely. It seems most enjoyed the challenge!
For Year 12 and 13, the Science and English departments joined forces to provide students the opportunity to research the ethics of human cloning before structuring their research into focused arguments. Students then structured their own debate, mimicking the parliamentary structure, and persuasively presented their arguments with coherence and panache.
