We were delighted to host the Royal Institute Computer Science masterclasses for Berkshire consisting of three future-thinking workshops designed to challenge even the most competent Year 9 Computer Science students.
Leighton Park, a centre of excellence for Computer Science, invited students to attend from The Downs, Willink, The Abbey, Queen Anne’s, The Holt and Kendrick School.
The first session, delivered by Philip Donaghy from Eton College, provided a fast and frantic workshop to explore cyber security and code to validate and create secure passwords using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Initially, pupils created the content for their password checker making use of a range of tags before adjusting the aesthetics for usability, exploring complex CSS using IDs and classes.
In week two, our very own Head of ICT, Peter Marshman, provided a masterclass on artificial intelligence. This involved exploring existing chatbots and looking into the Turing Test – a measure for artificial intelligence. It was then a chance for the masterclass students to create their own chatbot using Python. This was achieved using core programming constructs such as sequence, selection and iteration before making use of object-oriented classes and specialist libraries to create chatbots that would help with medical diagnosis, predict music tastes and even help you order a pizza.
In the third and final session, Ben Dornan from the Royal Institute provided a session where pupils were able to extract social media data from Twitter and carry out statistical analysis. This was achieved through the use of an online Python interpreter where they made use of a library in order to query users, tweets and retweets so that an analysis could be made from an extracted frequency of positive, negative and neutral words. Students were then able to discuss the nuances of the results and how such data could be used to identify public opinion.
The masterclasses have provided an exploration of complex programming concepts which reach far beyond the GCSE and A Level curriculum. They have provided girls and boys across Berkshire with an opportunity to see where the subject can take them and how it supports, and is threaded through, Psychology, Mathematics, Biology, English and more. It is with these experiences that we hope students will build on their work in the masterclasses and be able to complement their other subjects with their new-found knowledge and be future ready for the jobs of the future which require so many of these concepts and practices.
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