Year 11 visit to Microsoft Research

On the 30th January, 11 students from SWCHS went to Microsoft Research in Cambridge to celebrate the completion of the pilot for the Microsoft Gadgeteer programming competition. Jo Start entered a pressure plate alarm system and Matthew Barrett, Tim Dunham and Harry Brown submitted their Cue Card PowerPoint device. The students impressed the organisers so much that they won the school 2 Gadgeteer kits for future programming worth over £300. The students worked hard over the last 12 weeks to produce their gadgets. In this time, they learned the basics of programming, came up with an idea for their gadget, built it and finally had to learn and write the code to make the device work – no slim feat for some who had never even seen a programming language before.

There were lots of other presentations on the day including one explaining how the Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research solved the “Impossible” problem of getting the Kinect for the Xbox to work reliably and another from Professor Chris Bishop about untangling the web.

A great day was had by all, and hopefully inspired a few minds about Computing and Computer Science!