Year 5 & 7 Theme Park 2013

Once again Year 7 and Year 5 took part in a competition to design the best theme park that they possibly could.

With many of year 7 having recently been to Paulton's park as their rewards trip for the year, they knew what would make a good day out.  This was their chance to put that into practice.

With a budget of £500,000 teams (in houses) had to choose how many of different sorts of rides, as well as the more mundane car parking, and toilet blocks; all important in a theme park.

As you can see, there was a lot to think about!

Here, from top to bottom, is the order of teams.  Well done to everybody, espeically to our Year 5 visitors who did stunningly well (and at one point looked like they were going to win the day!).  When you join year 7 you have every chance of winning the day outright!

This was also a house competition, and to make it fair we are taking the mean of every house team. Results for this are...

Shelburne	80,627.71
Fitzmaurice	74,631.89
Kerry	72,074.50
Lansdowne	66,640.20

Well done to everyone that took part.

St Dunstans Visit

Huge thanks to year 6 for letting me visit today, and talk about codes and ciphers.  This is a part of their work on World War 2 at the moment.




We looked at some older ways of hiding codes, including shaving heads, tattooing it, and then letting the hair grow back, wrapping a strip of paper around a stick, and then writing the message, and even writing the message on the inside of a hard boiled egg (sadly this experiment has now failed 3 times, so it is not the most reliable method!!


We moved on to look at Caesar ciphers, pigpen ciphers (font here), and the Sherlock Holmes Dancing men cipher (Font here).  NB. Please ask permission before installing new fonts to your computer.


Eventually we moved on to talk about the magnificent work done by Bletchley PArk code breakers during the second world war.  We found a major flaw in the enigma code by putting loads and loads of 'D's into a virtual enigma, and looking at the output.  Here is the virtual enigma we used - can you spot any flaws!


I want to thank Y6 at St Dunstans again for letting me visit, and making me feel so welcome.  Hopefully many of them will work with us on the National Cipher Challenge when they join us next year