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While Covid-19 has raged around the world this term, members of QE’s Model United Nations Club have been examining the very different approaches to the pandemic taken around the globe. 

The 24 boys involved were each allocated a country, from Australia to Iceland and from the USA to North Korea. Each member, from Years 8 to 10, was given a brief to research his nation’s response to the crisis and look at the treatment for the virus and the global distribution of a vaccine in the future. 

They met regularly using Zoom to discuss the huge issues and challenges facing the global community. 

Academic Enrichment Tutor Gillian Deakin said: “It has been great to see the boys adopting their different countries and examining their responses to Covid–19. Every week they have contributed fascinating insights into how different countries have responded. 

“With countries as diverse as Japan, Iran, France, Kenya and the USA, the participants have had to get to grips with their often very different respective policies and perspectives.” 

The club is an academic simulation of the United Nations itself, where pupils take the roles of delegates from different countries and investigate possible solutions to global issues. 

The boys have also been learning how to write policy statements and resolutions in preparation for an MUN event at Magdalen College School, Oxford, in February next year.  

“They have gained real insight and understanding of the function of the different organisations within the UN in addition to an appreciation of the possibilities and challenges of the global development and distribution of a treatment or vaccination for Covid–19,” added Miss Deakin. 

“The boys are all looking forward to returning to the School and preparing for next year’s mini–MUN conference.” 

 The participants are listed below, each with his allocated country: 

Danny Adey (Year 10) – Japan; Eesa Ahmed (Year 9) – Saudi Arabia; Tejas Bansal (Year 8) – Germany; Dhruv Chadha (Year 9) – South Korea; Karan Chauhan (Year 8) China; Tharun Dhamodharan (Year 9) – India; Rahul Doshi (Year 10) – Russia; Kovid Gothi (Year 8) – France; Pranav Haller (Year 8) – USA; Seyed Jalili (Year 8) – Iran; Shaurya Madan (Year 8) – New Zealand; Dhruv Syam (Year 10) – Sweden; Rahul Kesavan (Year 10) – Sri Lanka; Saim Khan (Year 8) – Pakistan; Zaki Mustafa (Year 8) – UK; Jai Patel (Year 10) – South Africa; Vignesh Rajiv (Year 9) – Switzerland; Chanakya Seetharam (Year 8) Canada; Anban Senthilprabu (Year 9) – North Korea; Abhiraj Singh (Year 10) – Iceland; Sai Sivakumar (Year 9) – Australia; Mukund Soni (Year 10) – Italy, Anirudh Terdal (Year 8) – Kenya; Antony Yassa (Year 10) – Egypt. 

For the final week of term, in celebration of the energy and self-discipline QE’s boys have shown in persevering with virtual education, Years 7–9 are being invited to take a break and enjoy some strictly offline activities.

Dubbed Screen-off, Hands-on, the 2020 Junior School Enrichment Week offers boys an array of ‘real-world’ tasks to complete at home.

Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement) Crispin Bonham-Carter says: “The boys have done really well to apply themselves to remote learning throughout a long term, so our staff have come up with any number of creative and challenging tasks to make their last week of the year memorable and fun.

“Each department has created exciting subject-related tasks, and boys will have total freedom to create their own Enrichment Week curriculum by choosing which four challenges they want to take on each day.

“They might spend the week making films, creating musical instruments, baking cakes, designing gardens, creating food-art, constructing bird boxes, exploring photography, learning origami, working with ‘tangrams’, writing songs, designing fashion shows, cooking German and French food, camping in their gardens, orienteering… the list goes on!

“The only stipulation is that they record images of their achievements and submit neatly labelled scrapbook-style records to their form blog. In years to come, these will serve as yet another record of the creativity, energy and sense of fun with which our boys met the challenges of the 2020 lockdown,” Mr Bonham-Carter added.

The programme has been designed to ensure all tastes are catered for and includes activities from subjects not taught in Years 7–9 – such as Economics and Sociology – as well as the usual Junior School curriculum subjects.

The challenges are accessed through a dedicated eQE page, with full guidance for the boys on how to complete them. The Art department, for example, is challenging boys to “get creative with the food you have at home and present it in an imaginative, unique and artistic way”. Copiously illustrated with photos and videos, the department’s page includes tips on photography and the preparation of the food. It suggests ways to complete the activity at different levels – easy, intermediate, challenging and ‘the ultimate challenge’ – although boys are also told “you have the option of directing yourself and experimenting in your own creative way”.

A Year 12 team won both the prestigious Innovation Award and the new People’s Choice Award at the SECBE Constructing Excellence Awards.

Competing against entries from leading professional construction firms, QE’s four-strong Engineering Education Scheme team were rewarded by the judges for the strength of their design project aimed at reducing the risk of injury from band saws.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My congratulations go to the team on what is a great success both for them and for the School. Their very impressive submission evinced not only innovative thinking and a sound understanding of engineering principles, but also meticulous implementation and very effective communication of their ideas.”

Thomas Mgbor, Hugh Westcott and Kai Sethna donned black tie to take part in the awards ceremony, together with Technology teacher Tony Green. (The fourth team member, Brandon Ionev, was unable to take part because of an examination.)

Mr Green said: ‘The boys deserve all of the plaudits that will come their way for an outstanding performance.” He thanked all in the Elizabethan community who supported the team in their bid to win the People’s Choice Award, which was decided by popular vote.

The team worked with office design specialists Morgan Lovell on the project, which involved a number of suggested improvements to band saw guards and dust extraction systems. Tweeting their “huge congratulations” to the QE four, Morgan Lovell said: “We’re really proud to be alongside the engineering minds of the future”.

During visits to construction sites, boys saw that workers would often not use the blade guard fitted to existing band saws, because it was time-consuming to reset the guard manually each time to adjust it for different thicknesses of material.

To address the issue, the boys conducted extensive research over six months. They came up with three designs, all based on the same concept. The material pushes against the bottom of the blade guard, causing a force that pushes upwards and adjusts the blade guard automatically to the correct and ideal height for cutting. With no user input needed, saw operators could then work in the same way as before, but much more safely.

An additional benefit of the designs was that they incorporated significant improvements to the existing dust extraction systems of saws, thus reducing dust exposure – another health & safety concern – and allowing a more precise cut to be made because of the enhanced visibility of the cutting service.

The designs would work with different types of saw and, unlike existing guards, they covered the blade from multiple angles, which is another safety improvement. Because they could be retrofitted to existing machines, the guards hold out the promise of improving safety without huge expenditure. The boys were assisted by their industry mentor, representing Morgan Lovell, Health, Safety & Wellbeing Manager Alex Wood.

Team leader Thomas opened the team’s presentation to the judges at the virtual awards ceremony, before Hugh and Kai went through it in more detail. They faced some tough questioning from the judging panel, which comprised Chris Blythe (Chairman of SECBE, a construction industry not-for-profit company working towards positive change in the sector), Bill Ferris OBE (Chief Executive of Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust), James Wright (Framework Manager for Southern Construction Framework) and Julie Barry (Head of Business Development for RIFT R&D).

“Later in the day, we pushed for the People’s Choice Award on social media and won that award, too!” said Thomas. “It was a really enjoyable day to showcase our young talent and ‘show up’ some of the professional construction firms. In the words of SECBE, we were ‘recognised as the best’, and hope to inspire the rest.”

Year 12’s Sunay Challa was one of the first-prize winners in a prestigious competition for his exploration of how artificial intelligence could help economists solve some of the most pressing problems facing the world over the next 20 years.

His 1,500-word composition won him the Economics section – and a £1,000 prize – in the annual New College of the Humanities Essay Competition.

After his entry reached a shortlist of 350 from the initial 5,000 entries, Sunay was invited to a virtual awards ceremony, where he learned that he had secured the top prize. The judges praised his essay for its holistic approach and for his examination of the specific ways in which AI could benefit economists.

Congratulating him on his success, QE’s Head of Economics Shamendra Uduwawala said: “In a thought-provoking and insightful essay, Sunay identified a good sample of significant global problems and then set out exactly how AI might be able to help solve them, setting out both the capabilities and the limitations of this technology.”

The global competition for Year 12 students run by London’s New College of the Humanities involves participants answering a single question in one of seven humanities subjects: Art History; Economics; English; History; Law; Philosophy and Politics & International Relations. First, second and third prizes are awarded for each subject.

The question for the Economics category entered by Sunay was: Which problems will economists need to solve within the next 20 years and will artificial intelligence help them?

Sunay said: “I began my essay by considering the concept of Artificial Intelligence and the tools it can offer to economists and then then went on to look at the most significant future socio-political and environmental issues economists will be forced to deal with.”

Paying particular attention to how “data-fuelled modelling and solutions” could be used to improve existing systems, Sunay focused on five topics:

• Energy usage
• Wildlife protection
• Agricultural issues
• Cars
• Healthcare.

He included specific examples of the way AI is already being successfully used, mentioning, for example, a software program which identifies and tracks individual giraffes in Kenya by their unique coat patterns and ear outlines. An immense task, involving some 100,000 animals, it would be impossible for humans to undertake effectively without technological help. Yet, he wrote, the use of artificial intelligence had transformed the conservation effort: “A computer’s speed and ease of tracking means the giraffes are more effectively protected, with the giraffe population falling by 40% pre-AI and only 2% after its implementation.”

In the field of healthcare, Sunay wrote: “Although AI cannot find cures, it can definitely speed up their discovery by finding correlations in huge data sets, and this may prove critical in saving countless lives.”

In his conclusion, Sunay noted that “…we can see that wherever it is applied, AI brings to the table the unrivalled ability to parse through huge volumes of data in record time, and in turn save money and increase efficiency…While it may not be able to solve problems like humans, AI brings unmatched advantages to any task and as such will prove hugely beneficial in trying to solve economic problems.”

As well as the £1,000 prize money, Sunay wins an award that will be presented to him at a ceremony for which, because of the pandemic, no date has yet been set.

• You can read Sunay’s essay here.

Pupils in Year 8 and 9 French classes drew inspiration from a poem about racism in a lockdown poetry competition.

The starting point for the contest was a poem attributed to the 20th-century Senegalese poet and statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor, entitled Poème à mon frère blanc (Poem to my white brother).

The boys could either produce an English translation of the poem, their own poem inspired by the message of the original, or a commentary on the poem, with an analysis of the meaning and style.

French teacher Rebecca Grundy said: “We encouraged the boys to research the recent headlines about the Black Lives Matter movement in order to give their work a modern, updated twist. We were delighted with the way that they managed to take Senghor’s poem as inspiration while also reflecting on recent events: they produced some really beautiful, creative writing and translation work.”

Two winners were chosen:

• Aaron Rodrigo, of Year 8, for his English translation
• Darren Lee, of Year 9, for his own poem inspired by Senghor’s original but also expressing the outpouring of outrage caused by the death of George Floyd.

Aaron gave his entry the title Black Lives Matter – we can make a change! and illustrated it with the 2018 Nike advertisement featuring the face of the Manchester City forward Raheem Sterling and bearing the legend ‘Speaking up doesn’t always make life easier. But easy never changed anything’.

Darren’s 17-line homage to the original is entitled Poème à mon Frère Blanc – Revisit and Reflection. Starting with a very personal perspective (‘I may not be black, but I can still see the injustice’), it ends with the thought that recent events have affected the whole world: ‘…the infamous line that shook the globe, “I can’t breathe”’.

Darren and Rodrigo’s entries have been selected for inclusion in the next edition of The Arabella, QE’s pupil-produced arts magazine. Scroll below to read them.

Poème à mon frère blanc
Léopold Sédar Senghor

Cher frère blanc,
Quand je suis né, j’étais noir,
Quand j’ai grandi, j’étais noir,
Quand je suis au soleil, je suis noir,
Quand je suis malade, je suis noir,
Quand je mourrai, je serai noir.

Tandis que toi, homme blanc,
Quand tu es né, tu étais rose,
Quand tu as grandi, tu étais blanc,
Quand tu vas au soleil, tu es rouge,
Quand tu as froid, tu es bleu,
Quand tu as peur, tu es vert,
Quand tu es malade, tu es jaune,
Quand tu mourras, tu seras gris.
Alors, de nous deux,
Qui est l’homme de couleur ?

Poem to my white brother
Translation by Aaron Rodrigo
Dear white brother
When I was born, I was black
When I grew up, I was black
When I am under the sun, I am black
When I am sick, I am black
When I die, I will be black

While you, white man
When you were born, you were pink
When you grew up, you were white
When you are under the sun, you are red
When you are cold, you are blue
When you are scared, you are green
When you die, you will be grey
So, out of the two of us
Who is the coloured man?

Poème à mon Frère Blanc – Revisit and Reflection
Darren Lee
I may not be black, but I can still see the injustice,
To know if you’re a bystander then you’re an accomplice,
I may not be black, but I still see the gunshots,
To see the ground all covered in scarlet,
I may not be black, but I can read the numbers,
To show that black men are shot down to slumber,
I may not be black, but I can still hear their cries,
Of a black dad still waiting for his son,
Of a black girl still waiting for her mum,
Lives stolen by the flares of the gun.
I may not be black, but I’m still tired.
I will use my privilege as my weapon,
My voice as my ammo,
My beliefs as my grenades, to explode,
To call the war on racism as we grieve,
Should never have heard the infamous line that shook the globe,
“I can’t breathe”.