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!
Web Publishing with Upper Four
The Upper Four classes have just completed their Web Publishing topic by creating a four-page website. The topic focuses on website design, considering aspects such as colour palette, fonts and font size, image size, page layout and site navigation. The girls had a wide choice of topic and there are sites on, for example, favourite books, plastic waste, protecting bees, interior design, and Thailand.
Given a project brief, the girls had to produce wireframe diagrams of their page layouts before creating and collecting text, image and video resources for their sites. The final part was putting the sites together at weebly.com.
The girls enjoyed the topic and worked hard to create some impressive sites. Here is some of the feedback class teacher, Mr Hamilton, received.
“I personally really enjoyed this topic, and I think my website looks good and I hope other people felt the same”.
“I’ve really enjoyed doing this project because I’ve learnt so much more about a topic I’m really interested in”.
Upper Four B voted Aoife’s and Jaya’s to be the best; Upper Four S voted Phoebe’s and Heidi’s to be the best.
Here’s a selection to look through.
Phoebe http://bees22.weebly.com/
Heidi http://letsrecycleforlife.weebly.com/
Aoife http://acolour.weebly.com/
Jaya http://traveltothailandjva.weebly.com/
Charlotte http://daggersandblankers.weebly.com/
Naimh http://readersatheart.weebly.com/
Daisy http://twigplants.weebly.com/