Kilgraston Computing update

Kilgraston Computing update

Kilgraston Computing department have a busy Autumn term 2023:

Bebras Challenge
Congratulations to Anya in Upper 4 who achieved a Gold Award certificate in the recent Bebras Challenge.
In the Challenge, the aim is to solve as many of the computational thinking problems as possible in 40 minutes.
As a Gold Award certificate winner, Anya has been invited to take part in The Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC) which takes place online from 15th to 19th Jan 2024. It is aimed at students who have scores that put them in the top 10% of their age group in UK Bebras.
Best wishes to Anya for the OUCC.

CyberFirst Girls Competition
The CyberFirst Girls Competition aims to inspire girls interested in technology to pursue a career in cyber security. Teams of up to four girls tackle challenges from cryptography and logic to artificial intelligence and networking.
The Kilgraston team, ‘The Jags’, was made up of Justine, Anya, Sally and Georgina from Upper 4. They worked together well to solve many of the challenges and are certainly more knowledgeable now about cyber security than they were before.
Well done girls on taking part.

Data Science and Generative AI
Alastair Hamilton, lead data scientist at Altruistiq (www.altruistiq.com), gave a presentation via Teams to the National 5 Computing Science class recently.
He talked about his way into data science via a Physics degree and jobs at BP and Lloyds Bank where he had experience of using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Altruistiq is a company which provides tools to assist with the tracking of a business’s environmental impact. Being able to use data science in the area of sustainability attracted Alastair to Altruistiq.
The class found it very valuable to have a first-hand account of working in data science and were given a wide-ranging overview of the topic and the need for ways of managing and harnessing the vast amount of data that is gathered in many different areas of business. Alastair gave examples of the types of work he was involved in and then went on to show some examples of machine learning models, demonstrating an open-source text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion 2.1.

The girls asked interesting questions at the end of the presentation and were sure that Alastair was a real person and not a product of Generative AI!