Manufacturing, Missions, Masterminds, Monet, and Machines: Year 11 Colloquium Visit the Midlands
As the finale to their year, members of the Year 11 Colloquium have recently returned from a four-day trip to the Midlands (can we include Cambridge there geographically?!) Built around the motto of the Scholarship Programme, “Only Connect”, the trip built on the themes covered in the regular meetings over the year and sought out themes beyond the obvious as well as links between them.
A day was hardly enough to do justice to Bletchley Park, our first stop, where the group explored the many facets of this Secret Facility dubbed “The Intelligence Factory”, and its role in breaking not only the German Enigma Code but also its successor, the Lorenz Cipher. The students enjoyed an excellent workshop about personal cyber safety, in which they learnt how to keep safe in the digital world and how the work at Bletchley Park underpins so much modern technology. So many themes intertwine here; the creation of a small town of 9,000 people with all the attendant logistical demands, the cloak of secrecy, the importance of teamwork, the use of machines to defeat machines and the individual genius of those who worked there, most notably Alan Turing, but many others also. It is fitting to see Turing as the face on the £50 note and to read in the display Gordon Brown’s posthumous letter of apology from 2008 for the way the state had treated him in the post-war years.
Day two saw an exploration of technology and scientific techniques, as we visited the National Space Centre at Leicester and newly opened Richard III Visitor Centre. As well as marvelling at the technological advances, facilitating space exploration and then flowing from it, the Space Centre was also a history of the Cold War moving from conflict to cooperation over the International Space Station with the future more uncertain than it might have seemed a few years ago. We visited on the centre’s 25th birthday and Mr Cavendish gave an interview to BBC Radio Leicester about our visit. Science was also to the fore at the Richard III Visitor Centre, where a fantastic display explained its role in both locating and then verifying the discovery of Richard’s body in a council car park!
Day three found us in an industrial park on the outskirts of Cambridge. Here is located the excellent Centre for Computing History where the students enjoyed an excellent tour and a chance to play on many “ancient” machines. Mr Cavendish was able to relive his university days playing Space Invaders. Moving into the centre of Cambridge, the students enjoyed a walking tour of the city and visits to both the Fitzwilliam and Zoological museums before returning to our base in the National Forest. The visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum perhaps exhibited more than anything else the links spoken of earlier, referencing a work by the French artist, Anthony Blunt, Mr Cavendish moved from thinking about the painting itself to one of the world’s leading experts on that artist. Blunt was one of the Cambridge spies, pardoned following a confession and in the heart of the establishment for many years as Director of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the King’s, later the Queen’s, Pictures, exposed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and stripped of his knighthood. Much of this captured in Alan Bennett’s play “A Question of Attribution”. Art, politics, drama, espionage and the uncovering of secrets, many links indeed.
The trip finished with a visit to the Oxford University Open Day with visits to various departments followed by a walking tour of the city and a look inside The Queen’s College. Oxford is a city famous for manufacturing as well as learning (arguably a slightly artificial division) and the late afternoon was spent at the BMW plant in Cowley where the Mini is produced. Watching the automated process in full swing it was easy to believe, whilst knowing it was a programme to believe in the consciousness of machines; indeed, the nature of consciousness is a theme that will be explored in the Sixth Form Symposium next term.
From Oxford we returned to Eltham after what had been an excellent four days.
Pupil Reflection
By Tenten
My favourite part of the trip is certainly the visit to the BMW car plant. As a DT student, I got to see many concepts previously only found on textbooks before my own eyes, and it was really quite astonishing. You get to see the sheer scale of planning and coordination required for an object which we take often take for granted, and it makes me appreciate the level in technological advancement in this sector, as well as anticipate for what this industry has in plan for the future. The tour guide was very kind and were able to answer the specific questions I had surrounding the robotics and manufacturing aspects of the plant. Overall this visit has furthered informed my interest in engineering, and is definitely worth it.
