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Two senior QE teams have qualified for the national finals of the VEX EDR robotics competition after convincing performances in the regional rounds.

The teams are aiming to build on the School’s success last year, when QE junior boys competing in the parallel VEX IQ competition not only reached the World Championships in the USA but were crowned the UK’s first-ever world champions. A VEX EDR team from QE also qualified for the World Championships, where they achieved the best-ever result for a UK team.

In this year’s competition, Team Hybrid (pictured top), comprising boys from Year 10 and 11, stormed through to the national finals after being crowned Teamwork Champions and losing only one of their nine matches when they competed at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.

Cobra, a new team comprising Year 12 boys competing in their first-ever VEX EDR event, have also qualified for the nationals, which take place in Telford in March. They performed strongly throughout the round held at St Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington, where they finished third in the Skills Challenge. And in the next round, at The Henrietta Barnett School, they successfully reached both the knockout stage and the final, where they lost by a mere three points.

A third QE team, Apex, all from Year 10, still holds hope of qualifying for the national finals in the coming weeks. In the tournament at St Olave’s, Apex won the Judges’ Award for the design and construction of their robot and reached the semi-finals, where they lost out to the team which went on to win the round. Apex also performed strongly at HBS: like Cobra, they reached the knockout stages, where once again they were eliminated by the eventual overall winners.

The boys were accompanied at the tournaments by Technology teachers Alexander Vaughan and Charlie-Maud Munro. Mr Vaughan said: “My congratulations go to all the boys for their accomplishment. Hybrid and Cobra and are now looking forward to the national finals, with the latter team’s feat in reaching them particularly impressive, given their inexperience in VEX.”

The VEX EDR system has elements designed to fit each other easily, thus enabling seamless integration. The competitions typically feature a series of games in which teams’ robots are given points for accomplishing tasks such as stacking items, scoring goals and parking successfully. Teams are required to collaborate, as well as compete against others.

Several regional events are held, with the qualifying teams then going through to national finals and, ultimately, the World Championship, where the very best from almost 8,500 teams worldwide battle it out. There is a variety of prizes at each level, including awards for design, teamwork and all-round excellence.

This year’s QE VEX EDR teams are:
Team Apex: Swattik Das, Nirmay Jadhav, Ansh Jaiswal, Lucas Lu, Siddh Patel and George Sewell, all of Year 10
Team Cobra: Akram Ahmad, Mahdi Dhirani, Jimmy Ou and Leo Yang, all of Year 12
Team Hybrid: Dillan Shah and Alex Woodcock both of Year 10; Deshraam Ganeshamoorthy, Devin Karia, Daniel Radzik-Rahman and James Tan all of Year 11.

A QE boy’s correct answer to an outlandish numerical and scientific challenge won him a prize during a show aimed at inspiring young mathematicians.

Aryan Shrivastava correctly calculated that 7.5 million tins of Alphabetti Spaghetti would be needed to list the entire human genome, netting him a signed copy of Helen Pilcher’s book, Bring Back the King, which looks at the science that makes the resurrection of extinct animals a real possibility.

Helen, a scientist, comedian and writer for the science magazine, Nature, was the host for The Maths Inspiration Show at London’s Piccadilly Theatre, which was attended by around 60 Year 11 boys from QE.

She explored the distribution of letters found in a tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti. Her hypothesis was that there should be a strong correlation between the letters found in a tin and the occurrence of letters in the English language. In fact, the scatter graph she produced showed no correlation, nor did others for different languages, reported Mathematics teacher Phillip Brady.

Mr Brady said that Hugh Hunt, who is a lecturer at Cambridge University “put us all in a spin discussing the motion of balls, wheels and tops. He demonstrated how the gyroscopic effect can be used to rotate spacecraft and described why boomerangs come back (as well as demonstrating his boomerang-throwing skills).”

And he added that added that another speaker, Ben Sparks, who visited QE last year to speak to Year 10, took inspiration from Sting’s song, Shape of my Heart (about a poker player) to discuss some probability “whilst warning us of the perils of gambling. He was safe in his bet that in a random selection of 60 of the audience of 15 to 17 year-olds: there was at least one pair who shared a birthday.”

Matt Parker, who describes himself as a “stand-up mathematician”, related some of the mathematical errors set out in his book, Humble Pi. Some, he said, were simply amusing or embarrassing, such as McDonalds miscounting the combinations of meal deals and Pepsi underestimating the value of a fighter plane. However, he pointed out that some other mistakes he had come across could have more serious consequences, such as an aeroplane running out of fuel because the wrong units had been used to fill the tanks.

Afterwards, the pupils reflected on their favourite speakers of the day. Priyan Solanki said: “Hugh Hunt’s demonstration of the gyroscopic precession was very interesting.” (Precession is a change in the orientation of the rotational axis of a rotating body.) Harrishan Kangatheepan enjoyed Matt Parker’s explanation of how our minds can deceive us, especially with enormous numbers such as a trillion, while Ridwan Khan’s interest was piqued by Ben Sparks, from whom he learned aspects of probability that were new to him.

QE’s Young Enterprise group combined fun competitions and festive sales with some serious market research when they took part in Barnet Christmas Fayre.

The Year 10 boys participated in the popular seasonal event as part of the Barnet Teenage Market – a new attraction at the fair this year. Teenage Market is a national initiative that aims to give young people a free platform to showcase their creative talents.

Team member Shounak Pal said: “Throughout the day we were able to sell to visitors and gain invaluable experience.”

The Year 10 Reflex team sold Christmas essentials such as tinsel, wrapping paper and Christmas tree decorations. They also ran three competitions, showing visitors containers and challenging them to guess the number of candy canes and wine gums in their respective jars, as well as the weight of a tin of biscuits.

Academic Enrichment Tutor Lucy Riseborough said: “The competitions were very popular, generating a good profit for the team. They also managed to sell most of their Christmas stock on the day.”

During the event, Reflex also conducted market research into their current physical product, which is a vocabulary flashcard game complementing their educational app.

Among the other stallholders were a Young Enterprise team from The Henrietta Barnett School.
Shilacshan Lingakumar, of the QE team, said: “We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and found it a great opportunity to sell, and to check out the opposition!”

• The team can be followed on Twitter and Instagram: search for ye_reflex

Sixth-former Dylan Vekaria has been awarded a prestigious engineering scholarship with the RAF after successfully negotiating a rigorous selection progress.

Year 12’s Dylan received his Arkwright Engineering Scholarship, which is funded by the RAF Charitable Trust, from Group Captain Tony Keeling at a special ceremony at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, based in central London.

The Arkwright Scholarship Trust is a charity which aims to identify talented, potential top engineers, and to encourage them to pursue the subject at university. The scholarships themselves are awarded to high-ability students to support them through their Sixth Form studies. Every scholarship is sponsored by a commercial company, trade association, university, professional institution, armed service, government organisation or charitable trust.

Under the scheme, the pupil is awarded £600 while a further £400 goes to the School:  QE will spend it on resources and equipment. The scholarship runs over two years and is reviewed at the end of the first year.

Dylan, who is pictured with RAF Charitable Trust Director Justine Morton, can now benefit from hands-on work experience and support for curriculum projects, as well as the opportunity to be linked to a personal mentor.

Technology teacher Tony Green, who accompanied Dylan to the ceremony, said: “Dylan has done very well to secure this scholarship and the certificate rightly recognises his ‘outstanding potential as a future leader in Engineering’.”

Applicants are required to take a rigorous online aptitude test, lasting for two hours. After passing this Dylan had to attend a 20-minute interview before being matched with a sponsoring organisation – in his case the RAF.

The Arkwright Scholarships were established in 1991. The charity was named after the 18th Century engineer, Sir Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), who perfected the water frame and who is widely regarded as the father of the modern factory system.

For the first time ever, a QE team qualified for the prestigious Empire Mock Trial competition in New York, where they pitted their legal knowledge and courtroom acumen against some of the world’s finest young debaters.

The seven-strong Sixth Form team won their place after QE’s strong performance in the national finals in the UK Bar Mock Trial competition last academic year.

In New York XII (other Empire Mock Trial events are held in San Francisco and Atlanta), the QE boys achieved very close results against all the schools they faced and won one case, although the team was not among the overall winners. Most of the competing schools were from the USA. Empire Mock Trial also invites teams with a proven record of success from Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Korea and the UK to take part.

Congratulating the seven on their trail-blazing achievement, Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This was a very exciting opportunity for the boys involved and I know they seized the chance to interact with gifted young people from the US. Their success will no doubt inspire and motivate those in this year’s UK competition to give of their best and attempt to reach a similar stage again.”

Academic Enrichment Tutor Lucy Riseborough said the competition was a test of both ability and mental stamina. “Whilst similar to the UK version and drawing on similar skills (such as analysing and synthesising information, developing lines of questioning and argument, applying legal principles, learning procedures, effective communication and oracy) the Empire Mock Trial is based on the US courts system. The boys not only had to grapple with case files running to hundreds of pages (witness statements ran to 3,000 words each), but had to learn the different ‘objections’ to utilise (and defend themselves against) in the courtroom. With the ability of attorneys to choose which witnesses are called, the boys had to learn and prepare a lot of information that they would not, in fact, end up using; selecting the right information to deploy, and when, was therefore crucial.

“Each trial lasted about three hours and they were very ‘full-on’ – the boys had to be constantly thinking on their feet in challenging circumstances.

“More importantly, though, in many ways was the fact that the boys formed friendships and met lovely people from other countries – really benefiting from working with those from different educational and cultural backgrounds.”

The QE team were: Kieran Dhrona, Haider Jabir, Viraj Mehta and Saifullah Shah, all of Year 12, and Year 13’s Nathan Chu, Mipham Samtem, and Anake Singh.

Their preparations prior to flying to the US included a session alongside Chelmsford Girls’ Grammar School, during which lawyers advocated being bold with the use of objections.

Within the QE team there were four attorneys and three witnesses. The attorneys all both prosecuted and defended (depending on which side of the case QE had been allocated) and shared each case out between them.

“We faced four different schools across the competition, with incredibly close results in all of them – including against the American schools much more familiar with the particulars of the format,” said Miss Riseborough. “QE won the final case, with a very strong defence team – Mipham Samtem even managing to quote from The Great Gatsby when in full flow – although they were, in fact, praised by the judges throughout, with them commenting that they would never have known they were from a non-American school, such was their knowledge and grip on the procedures of the US court format.”

The case the trials dealt with was set in a fictional state called ‘Empirion’ and involved a hate crime against a member of the native people called ‘Empirions’. There was a protest by the Empirions who wanted a colonial statue taken down, with a counter-demonstration taking place by those arguing it should remain. Harry, an Empirion, approached Tommy Abel (member of the counter-demonstration), who was shouting offensive slogans through a loud-hailer. An incident occurred which led to Harry being hit with the loud-hailer and then supposedly kicked when on the ground. Tommy’s defence was that he had acted in self-defence initially, and he denied then kicking Harry when the latter was on the ground.

The case touched on the complexities around self-defence arguments, as well as on topical societal issues in relation to free speech and hate crimes. “There is, of course, a movement on both sides of the Atlantic arguing for the removal of supposedly colonialist symbols – such as the ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign begun in Oxford – with the issues much-debated and hotly-contested,” said Miss Riseborough.

As well as arguing the substantive charges, there were side debates (a pre-trial oral debate with the judge) around First Amendment rights. The judges were typically experienced attorneys.

During their trip, the QE boys took the opportunity to do some sight-seeing, notwithstanding the freezing temperatures and the snow that heralded their arrival. After dinner on the first evening, they went to Times Square, whilst the following morning they walked around Central Park in the snow. On the last day they went up the Empire State building to take in the view and also visited Grand Central Station.

Reflecting on the experience afterwards, Mipham said: “The Empire competition is a truly international experience that all the members of our team greatly enjoyed and were honoured to be a part of. We felt we represented what Britain has to offer on the world stage: confident, capable individuals with open minds and buckets of enthusiasm.”

His teammate, Saifullah, added: “Empire afforded us both the chance to sharpen our legal acumen within the courtroom and to expand our horizons outside of it. It was a truly pleasant experience to compete on an international stage and share thoughts with fellow students from all around the world. We would like to give a special thanks to Wando High School from South Carolina, who were exceedingly kind to us throughout the competition.”

Communication and teamwork skills as well as mathematical ability were key requirements at the regional round of the Senior Team Maths Challenge.

The four-strong QE team scored 164 points out of a possible 172 in the closely fought event hosted by City of London School.

Representing QE in the competition run by the UK Mathematics Trust and the FMSP (Further Mathematics Support Programme) were Edward Hu, Bhavesh Patel, Suvir Rathore and Saruthan Seelan, all from Year 12.

The competition offers pupils an alternative way to express and develop their enjoyment of Mathematics, as well as developing teamwork and communication.

There were three rounds:

• In the Group round, ten questions had to be solved in 40 minutes
• In the Crossnumber, one pair of competitors was given the across clues and the other pair the down clues, although several clues were interlinked
• In the Shuttle, pairs answered questions alternately, with the answer to the previous question providing crucial information for the following one.

The QE team came sixth out of the 30 teams who had entered. First place went to Highgate School, second to Dame Alice Owen’s School and third to the hosting independent boys’ school.

Team captain Edward Hu said “We had a great day competing against and meeting other mathematicians. It was fun and we really enjoyed the Crossnumber, but were obviously disappointed not to progress further in the competition.”