Y10 Do the Apprentice

Congratulations to Year 10 for a fabulous Business and Enterprise PSHEE day based on The Apprentice.

As well as learning about about personal and business finance options, Year 10 planned an event, designing tickets, room layout, and catering (including cupcakes!) and  entertainment options.

They came dressed to do business, as you can see from the pictures below.

Best Maths Question... Ever...

Have a look at the link below.

I'm not sure I've worked out the answer!

What do you all think...

http://flowingdata.com/2011/10/28/best-statistics-question-ever/

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

KS4 Parents Forum

We hope you found the KS4 Parents forum useful.

Here are the slideshows from the evening, in case you either missed the evening, or want to recheck any dates.

Y10 Maths

Y10 English

Y11 Maths

Y11 English

Visit to King's Lodge School

Miss Martin and I went to spend an hour with both Y6 classes at King's Lodge school in Chippenham this afternoon.  It was part of their topic on World War 2, and we went to do a bit of maths, and a bit of history about code breaking - in particular code breaking during the war.

We started with a bit of more ancient history - messages wrapped around sticks, shaved heads and tattoos, and even messages written on the inside of a hard boiled egg!

Next we talked a bit about the Caesar Shift - to download your own code wheel click here...

We even had a play with a virtual German Enigma machine.  It has got 15 000 000 000 000 000 000 possible settings!  To play with the settings and encrpyt your own messages you can click here...

To finish students solved a murder mystery, where clues covered a range of different techniques. The key to each of the clues can be found here.

Thankyou to King's Lodge for inviting us in, and a massive well done to Y6 - we were very impressed with how well you engaged with the discussion and the challenges!

National Cipher Challenge 2011

It is back, one of the most fun and eagerly awaited competitions of the year (for me anyway!)

The National Cipher Challenge is a codebreaking competition open to schools across the UK.  Registration opens on Thursday 15th September, with the first challenge on Thursday 29th September at 3:15

We are looking for teams of about 4 students per team willing to take part.

Training will be given in Maths Club time, Tuesdays after school and open to everyone.

For more details, come and see Mr Smy, or just turn up to maths club on Tuesday.

The Competition site is http://www.cipher.maths.soton.ac.uk/.

Good Luck!  As well as the national Leaderboard, we will be posting a John Bentley Leader board here on the blog.

Well Done Y13

Thursday saw The John Bentley School Maths department achieves its best A Level results ever!

In total our students (6 of whom are pictured above) achieved....

1 A*, 8 As, 4 Bs, 1 C and 1 D. These results are not only a significant achievement in themselves, but beat both their personal targets and school targets.

In addition this was the first year group at John Bentley to study for Edexcel AS level in Further Maths, acourse that is rapidly growing in popularity at school.

Results for Further Maths were ...

2 A's, 1 B, 1 C, and 1 D. Students achieved these Further Maths results in just 1 lesson a week, with significant amounts of independant learning and hard work.

One student worked even harder than the rest, and taught himself A2 Level further maths, including the Further Pure 2 & 3 modules! Despite having to do most of the work independantly James managed to not only achieve an A* in maths, but and A in Further maths.

All of our students worked really hard over two years, and deserve the fabulous results above. Despite being involved in many other things both in school and out, such as Duke of Edinburgh awards, many being Head Students, and sporting commitments they never let anything get on the way of their studies.

Well done!