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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”.

Perspective, QE’s new pupil-led forum looking at issues such as race, has been launched and is already going from strength to strength, with involvement from current boys, alumni and senior staff.

Set up in collaboration with the School in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, Perspective aims both to provide opportunities for discussion and to give boys useful resources so that they can easily learn more themselves.

The first Perspective panel discussion has now taken place, chaired by School Vice-Captains Thomas Mgbor and Ayodimeji Ojelade, who have been key figures in establishing the forum. Old Elizabethan brothers Kelvin and Elliot Hughes were invited as special guests to join the Zoom conversation with boys from Year 11 and 12. Headmaster Neil Enright and Assistant Head (Pupil Development) Michael Feven also took part.

In addition, information on various topics has now been added to eQE, the School’s online platform, on a dedicated Perspective page that was created by Thomas and Ayodimeji, with input from QE’s team of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Ambassadors.

Mr Enright thanked Kelvin and Elliot for contributing to the one-and-a-quarter hour online discussion – “so informative for me personally”.

The Headmaster added: “I take the responsibility really seriously – this is the tip of the iceberg of the conversations that we need to continue to have and I am fully committed, as are my colleagues, to continuing and sustaining these discussions and to enabling them to take place in all parts of the School – it’s a huge undertaking.”

The Perspective eQE page now provides a basic introduction and links to further resources on the:

• Black Lives Matter movement
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• GSM (Gender & Sexual Minorities) community and Pride
• Yemen humanitarian crisis.

Mr Feven said: “Perspective is an exciting development in promoting the ‘student voice’ at the School and in educating the boys on social issues. With forthcoming updates due to focus on gender equality, climate change, the Hong Kong protests, and the Xinjiang re-education camps (and there is an ambition for further issues to be covered in time), I am hopeful that Perspective will continue to provide a platform for further activity and continuing discussion in the next academic year.”

The Zoom discussion featured a number of topics, including the racism faced by participants during their lives.

Kelvin and Elliot, who have both been very supportive of the School as alumni over a number of years, offered to take part, bringing their own understanding to current pupils as those from the generation above.

Kelvin (OE 1999–2006) recalled one incident when, as an 11-year-old, he went to a football camp in Totteridge Lane. Another participant made a racist comment to him, but he did not understand it, so asked his mother about it when he got back.

His mum, normally very mild-mannered, was extremely angry and upset at what had been said. A tense discussion later took place among the adults at the camp, which culminated in the other child – who had himself not understood what he was saying, since it was something he had picked up at home – leaving.

“It was really interesting to start to realise that the point of difference and point of tension was the colour of your skin, and I think it was a real moment where something changed for me,” said Kelvin. “My mum had moved across to the UK in the 1980s. My mum was mixed-race and my grandma, my white grandma, had lived in Ghana during independence and also faced racism, the other way around.”

After a career working in various roles, including consultancy to social mission-driven organisations, Kelvin is now the Chief Executive Officer of Clean Team Ghana, an organisation working to provide affordable sanitation options for residents in the city of Kumasi.

During the Zoom discussion, he also related another incident from when he was in the Sixth Form at QE. He had gone out during the lunchbreak to meet his girlfriend. Dressed in his suit, he was sat waiting in his car and had been doing some A-level History revision when a policeman approached. “He immediately accused me of being a drug-dealer…All he saw was a young, black guy out to cause trouble: who I was didn’t matter; what I had achieved didn’t – all he saw was the colour of my skin and immediately put me in a box.”

Kelvin’s brother, Elliot (2002–2009), a property specialist in London, thanked Thomas and Ayodimeji for chairing the discussion and praised QE for supporting Perspective: “Not every single school and teacher would be willing to use their time to facilitate this sort of thing.”

QE was, he added, well-placed to “start to accelerate the change and, hopefully, become a catalyst for other schools to do the same”.

A Sixth Form engineering team’s innovative design project aimed at reducing the risk of injury from band saws is in the running for a major construction industry award.

The Year 12 team’s suggested improvements to band saw guards and dust extraction systems have been nominated for an Innovation Award in the annual Constructing Excellence SECBE Awards 2020 finals, where their fellow competitors include professional firms working in the industry. They are also hoping to win a new award introduced this year – the People’s Choice award, which is decided by popular vote.

The four boys – Brandon Ionev, Thomas Mgbor, Kai Sethna and Hugh Westcott – worked with office design specialists Morgan Lovell on the project. With the nomination, the four are following in the footsteps of other QE EES teams of recent years whose inventions under the Engineering Project Challenges initiative have achieved regional and national success.

Their entry was one of just two in their category to be selected by the judges to be interviewed in a ‘head-to-head’ at the virtual awards ceremony on Thursday 2nd July.

QE’s Head of Technology, Michael Noonan, said: “My congratulations go to these four students, who worked hard to come up with innovative designs that fulfilled the brief and were based on sound engineering principles. With the support of the Elizabethan community, they also stand a good chance of clinching the People’s Choice Award. We think they thoroughly deserve it, so please cast your vote now! Thank you.”

The deadline for voting is 5pm on Thursday 2nd July. To vote, visit the awards page describing the boys’ entry, scroll to the bottom and click the People’s Choice button.

During visits to construction sites, boys saw that workers often fail to use the blade guard fitted to existing band saws, because it is tedious and 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 with the same basic idea. 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. Two of the designs use simple rails and sliders to autonomously adjust the height, while the third uses a rack and pinion. With no user input needed, saw operators can work in the same way as before, but much more safely.

An additional benefit of the designs is that they incorporate 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 cover the blade from multiple angles, which is another safety improvement. Because they can 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.

During the spring, just before the COVID-19 social distancing measures were put in place, the Morgan Lovell team and a second QE team working with Morgan Lovell’s sister company, Overbury, gave presentations on their projects to members of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH, a UK-based global chartered body for health & safety professionals),  at UBM’s centre, close to Blackfriars Bridge in London.

Year 10 pupil Ashwin Sridhar’s design for a doorstep smart box to stop delivery packages being stolen has won a top prize in an international competition.

Ashwin’s device, which he named the Raptor Adversus, uses a host of measures to thwart thieves trying to gain access to packages inside – and even sounds the alarm if anyone tries to steal the whole box.

The Raptor Adversus won him the Best in Show, Senior Division Europe award, in SAM Labs’ STEAM and Coding Creators Competition. Through the global competition, SAM Labs – a UK-based company making app-enabled construction kits widely used in education – challenged pupils in Covid-19 lockdown to showcase their coding projects.

Ashwin’s award was announced in a global awards livestream broadcast.

Congratulating him, QE Head of Technology Michael Noonan said: “Ashwin’s competition entry was well illustrated and included an account of the three different iterations of his device, thus demonstrating that he had worked very methodically to tackle the problem of package-stealing.”

The competition submission began by outlining the problem. “Online delivery has been integrated into our society,” Ashwin wrote. “Forbes estimates the average person in the United States receives up to 21 packages a year. However, with online delivery’s increase in popularity, a new epidemic has arisen – package-stealing.”

Using CAD software, Ashwin designed a device aimed not only at preventing thefts, but also at deterring thieves from even making the attempt.

His Raptor Adversus (meaning ‘against a thief’) design features:

• A motorised safe door opened with a passcode known to the homeowner and shared with the postman or delivery person
• An audible alarm
• A camera
• A tilt-and-pressure sensor
• Coloured indicator lights coded to indicate whether or not the box is empty and whether a letter or parcel is inside.

His initial iteration was designed to take a photo and send it to the homeowner’s phone when anyone used, or attempted to use, the passcode system. The alarm would sound – drawing the attention of people in the area, in case the person at the box was a would-be thief. Only then, after a delay, would the box open.

Ashwin realised that this would only deter thieves who were actually attempting to open the box, so his first refinement was to include a proximity sensor (with a range that could be adjusted by the owner) that would sound an alarm and take a photo of anyone who got close.

In the third iteration, he added the tilt sensor to sound an alarm if anyone tried to remove the whole box.

A QE trio have won a major prize in a digital competition focused on the future of space travel.

The team, who are all from the same Year 9 Pearce form group, took the Innovation Award in the Galactic Challenge One Small Step competition with their design for a vehicle to explore the Moon’s surface in 2030 in preparation for establishing a human settlement there.

Several other QE teams and individuals also won awards in the competition, which was organised by a team led by Old Elizabethan Aadil Kara (2010–2017), who is Chair of Galactic Challenge.

Last year, QE hosted a Galactic Challenge event at the School and had planned to do so again this summer until the Covid-19 restrictions forced its cancellation. Instead, Galactic Challenge ran the special digital competition.

QE’s Head of Physics, Jonathan Brooke, said: “This was an exciting competition, requiring boys to exhibit creativity and scientific understanding. And at a time when everyone’s horizons have been shrunk because of lockdown, it also gave boys a timely opportunity to turn their gaze to the stars.”

Entrants were asked to produce a design for a vehicle that would be home to four astronauts during a six-month mission, taking into account factors such as how electrical power would be provided and what would be needed to support the astronauts’ living conditions.
Vignesh Rajiv, Maxwell Johnson and Sai Sivakumar took the Innovation Award – one of only four major prizes open to their age group. They proposed HNHV, the Helium-3 Noisu Habitation Vehicle (pictured right and left).

In their award citation, the competition judges explained why they had chosen the team’s entry: “This interesting proposal identified Helium-3 as a potential material to be mined from the Moon as a future energy source. Vignesh, Maxwell and Sai’s design consisted of two halves each housing two astronauts; a creative way to separate the operational and habitable components of the vehicle.”

Aadil has a longstanding involvement with Galactic Challenge, a regional competition for younger pupils and a sister competition to the UK Space Design Competition (UKSDC). In his final year at QE, Aadil progressed from the UKSDC to the International Space Settlement Design Competition, hosted by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Aadil graduates from Imperial College in Physics this summer.

Other QE successes in the competition included:

• Gold awards for two entries – Koustuv Bhowmick, of Year 8, and Krishn Bhowmick, of Year 7, for their VIXI design, and Vaibhav Gaddi, of Year 8, for his vehicle, which he named Caladenia Elegans (the elegant orchid spider)
• Silver awards to two Year 7 teams and a Year 8 team – Azmeer Shahid, Shuban Singh, Shivam Trivedi and Anish Errapothu, for Dark Voyager (pictured top); Daksh Vinnakota, Ved Nair, Ojas Jha and Keon Robert for Spatium Rimor I, and Year 8’s Ishtarth Katageri, Sachit Kori, Anirudh Terdal and Abhay Halyal for ML Pioneer
• Bronze awards for two entries – Pranav Haller, of Year 8, for his design, The Hermes, and Year 7’s Giuseppe Mangiavacchi, Trishan Chanda, Timi Banjo and Rayan Pesnani for Luna Rimor.