Today Harrow Way attended the annual Blue Fusion event run by IBM at their premises in Hursley with six Year 10 students. During the day the students competed in a series of challenges “Designed to challenge the teams, but also to develop their awareness of science, engineering and technology through interactions with emerging technologies”.
These varied from working out how to ‘speak’ to a computer using DTMF tones played on musical instruments to solve maths problems, how to control a mechanical arm by controlling the different ‘muscles’, planning routes for taxis to collect customers and earn money against other teams, encode a message using cryptography techniques and send it to the other half of the team via morse code, design the flightpath of a spaceship designed to photograph multiple planets and more.
Each activity required massive amounts of teamwork and each member of the team had their own roles to play. The day culminated in a match against the spaceship every team had designed earlier in the day to see which took the best ‘photos’ and so made the most money.
The Harrow Way students consistently held the 1st place on the scoreboard throughout the day against the other 11 schools taking part and maintained this lead, taking the 1st place award in the IBM Theatre at the end of the day.
– Well done to the students who took part! A gallery of photos and a couple of short videos are available in our gallery here.