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Golden generation: QE’s glittering debut in computing aptitude competition

Shown here are QE’s gold award-winners in the UK Bebras Challenge – a competition that aims to introduce pupils to computational thinking.

These winners, representing almost three-quarters of the QE entrants, qualified for their awards after coming in the top 10% of entrants nationally. Among them are 12 pupils, from Years 8 & 9, who achieved a perfect score.

QE’s entrants achieved an average score of 179 points – far ahead of the Hertfordshire and national averages of 112 and 106 respectively.

Head of Digital Teaching and Learning Michael Noonan said: “This was an extraordinary collective performance from our students in their first-ever participation in this competition. The gold award-winners now go on to the next round, called The Coding Challenge, which will be held in School on 24th March – QE’s 452nd anniversary.

“We recognise the importance of digital literacy and are keen to encourage boys’ participation in exciting computing-related events and competitions through our QE Flourish programme.”

The Bebras Challenge is organised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in partnership with the University of Oxford. It involves tackling a series of interactive tasks designed to encourage logic and problem-solving.

Distinction prizes were awarded to the top 25% of QE performers in the Bebras Challenge’s intermediate (Years 8 & 9) and élite categories (Sixth Form), while merit prizes went to the next 25%.

Best-in-school prizes went to the 12 intermediate category boys with perfect scores of 220: These are, in Year 8: Vivaan Gupta; Aaron Singh; Rishaan Harne; and Noble Laturia. The Year 9 boys are: Kiyan Popat; Ryan Uppal; Aarush Yadav; Aneesh Botcha; Atharva Rao; Avi Aggarwal; Kian Aggarwal; Priyankan Ampalavanar; Arjun Darade; Arnay Gupta; Advik Gupta; Tahiyan Khan; Darsh Nandania; Aaditya Pimple; and Niketh Putta.

Akhilesh Karthikeyan, of Year 12, took the élite prize with his score of 192.

In The Coding Challenge, boys will be able to choose between five skill-based categories, two using the Turtle Blockly programming language, and three that require a text-based language.

  • Twenty-five sixth-formers (18 in Year 12 and seven in Year 13) sat the British Informatics Olympiad 2025 first round. BIO aims to encourage students to take an active interest in information technology. The first round involves problems to be solved against the clock with only a pen, paper and a computer. The results will be released later this month.
Champions again! QE repeats Mathematics competition victory

A Sixth Form team from QE fought off entrants from other top schools to win the international Ritangle Mathematics competition for the second consecutive year.

The eight-strong winning team from Year 12, called Pioneers, were the first of some 1,700 teams to submit the right answer to a series of three crossnumber puzzles. After meticulous checking by the judges in the competition run by education charity MEI (Mathematics, Education, Innovation), they were pronounced this year’s Ritangle Champions.

Furthermore, last year’s winning QE team, Flexangle, came second.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My hearty congratulations go to all who have done well and, in particular, to the Pioneers team. They demonstrated consistency throughout the various stages of competition, as well as speed and accuracy in the final round, in the process besting leading schools both from this country and abroad.”

Ritangle is open to pupils aged 16‌-‌18 studying for A-level Mathematics, or its equivalent. This year’s competition, launched on 25th September, attracted some 500 more entries than last year. It involved three stages.

For the first three weeks of Stage 1, one question was released every Wednesday. Every correct answer revealed a piece of information that helped solve the final task.

In part 2 of Stage 1, a question was released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, prior to the release of the final Stage 1 question. Again, every correct answer helped participants to solve the Final Task.

Stages 2 and 3 followed quickly upon each other, culminating in the final Stage 3 round of crossnumbers set by website Crossnumbers Quarterly.

Besides Flexangle, a further three QE teams reached the final shortlist, which comprised 16 teams from 12 schools who submitted completely correct solutions within 24 hours of the Pioneers team doing so.

The 12 included not only some familiar names, such as Haberdashers’ Boys’ School and King’s College London Mathematics School, but also Doha College (Qatar) and The English School, Nicosia (Cyprus).

It is also understood that all the QE teams were in the top 200. The 19 teams entered is itself thought to be a record from a single institution.

The prize for the overall winners included individual treats as well as a year-long subscription to the Integral mathematics support website and a trophy for the School. The prize was presented by John Brennan-Rhodes from MEI during Year 12 assembly.

The winning Pioneers team are:

  • Aryan Kheterpal
  • Samrath Sareen
  • Sasen Kankanamge Don
  • Hisham Khan
  • Adithya Raghuraman
  • Danyal Talha
  • Eesa Malek
  • Nayaenesh Jeyabalan

Runners-up (and last year’s winners) Flexangle, of Year 13, are:

  • Anshul Nema
  • Harik Sodhi
  • Koustuv Bhowmick
  • Joel Swedensky
  • Shreyas Mone

The three other QE teams on the final shortlist are:

Los Desmos Hermanos (Year 12)

  • Keshauv Sutharsaraj
  • Rishik Siripurapu
  • Rithul Shency
  • Ayan Hirani
  • Maitrayen Srikumar

Desi Derivatives (Year 13)

  • Adyan Shahid
  • Kovid Gothi
  • Vijay Lehto
  • Dinuk Dissanayake
  • Panth Patel
  • Rayan Nadeem
  • Arka Gonchoudhuri

The Homeomorphs (Year 12)

  • William Joanes
  • Akhilesh Karthikeyan
  • Pranav Challa
  • Ram Chockalingam
  • Yash Kedia

 

“The greatest benefit to humankind”: Old Elizabethan’s “stunning breakthrough” in protein research wins him a Nobel prize

Old Elizabethan Sir Demis Hassabis has been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, jointly with a colleague at the AI company he founded and with an American scientist.

Demis (OE 1988–1990), who is the co-founder and CEO of AI company Google DeepMind, receives half of the prize with his DeepMind colleague, Dr John Jumper, for their work on predicting complex protein structures. The other half of the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes to Professor David Baker, from the University of Washington, for his work on protein design.

In their statement, the prize committee wrote: “Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

“Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.

“In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.”

The Nobel Committee emphasised the global impact of AlphaFold2. It has been accessed by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. Examples of its many applications include: helping scientists to understand better antibiotic resistance; and creating images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Reacting to the news, Demis, 48, said: “It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming.”

He explained the “funny sequence” through which he actually heard the news that he was a Nobel laureate. Since the committee did not apparently have a telephone number for him, they had reached him through a Teams call to his wife, who was working on her laptop at the time. After at first ignoring it, she answered it at around the third or fourth call. The caller then requested to be put in touch with Demis, whom they asked for Dr Jumper’s number.

Demis thanked his colleagues, including Dr Jumper, adding: “David Baker we’ve got to know in the last few years, and he’s done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it’s really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”

The Nobel prize committee praised the work of Professor Baker, which he began in 2003, saying that he had “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

The committee’s statement concluded: “Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.”

The illustration above shows a selection of protein structures determined using AlfaFold2 (©Terezia Kovalova/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

 

 

Supporting our Silicon Valley set!

Three Old Elizabethan entrepreneurs in San Francisco have linked up and are now connecting with other alumni working in the world’s leading centre for technology companies.

Pavir Patel sent Headmaster Neil Enright the above photo of himself, Akshat Sharma and Richard Ou together in San Francisco. The three only discovered that they had the same alma mater through chance conversations, but, since then, they have created a group chat and have been expanding it to include more OEs in and around the Bay Area.

Mr Enright said: “Our alumni network has been growing rapidly in recent years, with leavers supporting each other, sharing professional opportunities and socialising together. Especially for alumni far from home, like Richard, Akshat and Pavir, it can be good to spend time with others who share a similar background. As a School, we are doing all we can to support such connections through our QE Connect social and business network.”

Richard (OE 2010–2015) said: “All three of us are founders looking to build billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Quite a few QE boys that I’ve met in the US have been entrepreneurs, too, all having raised not so insignificant amounts of capital. It feels like we’re following in the footsteps of Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, maybe a few years or a decade behind.” (Demis [OE 1988–1990] and Mustafa [1995–2002] were among the three co-founders of leading AI company DeepMind, formed in 2010.)

“What I am really excited about is more people from QE coming to the US. I think this is the place to be,” Richard added.

Pavir (OE 2003–2010) and Akshat (2012–2019) are part of the long-established international Entrepreneur First accelerator, which runs one of its four programmes in San Francisco. “However, they’d not met until after Pavir’s encounter with me,” says Richard. “I met Pavir at a FinTech AI hackathon hosted at the Digital Garage office in San Francisco. The conversation went something like this:”

Richard: “Where in the UK are you from?”

Pavir: “London, what about you?”

Richard: “I’m from London as well. Whereabouts?”

Pavir: “Stratford, and you?”

Richard: “Highgate”

Pavir: “I used to go to school up north of Highgate!”

Richard: “Really, where?”

Pavir: “QE Boys”

Richard: “Holy sh*t, I went to QE as well!”

Richard later met Akshat at the Entrepreneur First office.

As for Pavir and Akshat, they knew each other through being in the same accelerator, but did not realise the full extent of their connection until a conversation in a Waymo (self-driving car) turned to their backgrounds. “It was surreal,” said Akshat. “We were mates already and were speaking about our homes in the UK and school experiences…and there was a moment of realisation of ‘Wait a second – that sounds very familiar’ when we realised we both went to QE!”

Richard said he realised even before going to university where he needed to be to pursue his goal of founding and growing a startup. “I knew that if I wanted to do it, the only place I could was the US. The problem was that education in the US was so expensive – four years of a degree course can easily be $250,000.”

The solution he arrived at was to go to King’s College London, majoring in Physics (“my passion”) for his first degree and then come to the US for a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania – “only two years!” He worked out some further ways to reduce the financial burden, including becoming a Resident Advisor (RA) – a peer mentor for other students – which comes with the major plus that free housing and food are provided.

The idea for his business came about when he graduated from ‘Penn.’ last year and was looking for a graduation photographer. “I realised it was really hard – there is not really any infrastructure for freelancing.”

With time on his hands, he worked out a plan for a business to put that right, checking that he had a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). He shared the plan with the photographer he had eventually found, Jerry Cai. “As soon as I pitched it to him, he said: ‘I want in.’”

The two became co-founders of Agorum, described on its website as “a freelancer marketplace connecting clients with skilled creatives”. They have started initially by focusing on freelancers who require a physical presence for their work – photographers, DJs and private chefs.

The process has not always been easy. “Funding was difficult at first. We tried raising funds last year when the economy was not doing very well.”

Since then, however, they have been scaling rapidly, and Richard is focused on taking the business global. Agorum was recently valued at $10m.

“I think what changed things was moving to the Bay area: I don’t think there is an eco-system like the Bay’s that exists anywhere else in the world.”

He acknowledged the help provided by his accelerator – VIP-X (different from Pavir’s and Akshat’s). VIP-X is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and caters primarily for people associated with Penn. and Wharton. It takes no equity and offers what are essentially grants, not loans.

“I think one of the hardest parts of doing a startup is the loneliness and distance that comes with it,” said Richard. “Few people can relate.” In particular, he has found the constant need for absolute discretion about his plans for the business hard.  “As the CEO, there is only so much you can ever say.”

“As my role has changed from managing a team of 1.5 people to now a team of ten, the problems are constantly evolving.”

“The thing is persistence,” Richard said, stressing the importance of listening to clients, who sometimes provide the only clue as to a way forward.  “There is something about this gut instinct – and it usually comes from your customer. It becomes your driving force.”

Richard has no doubt as to the source of his strength. “When I look back at my time at QE, it was hard. A lot of homework and pressure. Retrospectively, that is what helped, giving me the resilience I am drawing on now. A lot of people have shared that with me, too. Things were always hard, but that raised your tolerance for a lot of things.”

For his part, Akshat is currently building a company called Orbit. The sad truth about the current digital age is that “we have never been historically unhappier,” he said. “Orbit will empower people by making mental health as transparent and actionable as physical health through a non-invasive brain wearable. Orbit is unlocking cognition by building the first foundation model of the brain!”

In addition to his work with Entrepreneur First, Akshat is part of the first cohort of Founders – the University of Cambridge’s own accelerator programme. He graduated from Cambridge in Biomedical Engineering last year, launching Orbit at the start of 2024.

“At the Neuro Optics Lab [in Cambridge], I developed the first, and only, brain computer interface using HD DOT, a novel imaging approach to track human brain function at comparable resolutions to an fMRI. This modality, being cheap, portable and high resolution, is uniquely positioned to create the foundation model of our brains!”

Akshat has won multiple awards at international conferences and is writing a first-author paper on the subject.

By leveraging the novel wearable technology, Orbit is focussing on making brain-tracking as simple and accessible as Fitbit made fitness-tracking – “all in the comfort of your favourite baseball cap or beanie!” as he put it.

“With each version, Orbit builds the largest, real-world brain data-sets to unlock new secrets about the way we perceive the world around us – our cognition. It starts by understanding mental workload and aims to progress to complex mental states, including anxiety, stress and depression. Each version helps us regain control of a new emotion, at each step regaining happiness through giving us a deeper understanding and control of our brain.”

Finally, Pavir Patel’s business is Outerop. Like Akshat’s start-up, it launched at the beginning of this year. Outerop helps grow businesses online using AI, making it easier for them to build high-quality, reliable Large Language Model (LLM) products and to start creating self-optimising LLM pipelines (a series of steps where the output of one is the input of the other). Its slogan is: “Build GenAI products your customers love.”

Since reading Economics at Nottingham, Pavir has, he said, “done all sorts – from incubating J P Morgan’s first AI startup doing NLP; setting up their FinTech team in Asia (Hong Kong was awesome!) and scaling Europe’s leading broker/crypto exchange, Bitpanda Pro, to spinning off a company with a Series A raise [a company’s first significant round of venture-capital financing] to launching an e-commerce business with my wife”.

Car-sharing at QE up by more than a fifth as parents enthusiastically sign up for environmental app, cutting pollution and congestion

QE parents and staff have reduced the number of low-occupancy car journeys on the school run after signing up in numbers for a new app aimed at reducing local traffic and cutting CO2 emissions.

It is only six months since the School partnered with HomeRun and launched its app with parents and staff, but already the single-family car usage rate has been cut by 9%, thanks mainly to a 22% increase in journeys shared.

HomeRun’s impact report states that QE families have thus saved some 10 tonnes of CO2 and 22,633 school run miles – equivalent to 481 mature trees or 0.9 trips around the equator.

The high level of participation – the families of 526 pupils have signed up – has unlocked a £1,000 grant to the School from HomeRun. The money is being invested into QE’s Greenpower team, which builds electric racing cars.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My thanks go to all parents and colleagues who have signed up: this is a real environmental success and a great start to our involvement with HomeRun. As a School, we seek to be good neighbours, and these figures are a ‘win’ both for us and for residents on nearby streets, where there is a reduction in both pollution and vehicle movements.

“Many of our boys already travel to QE on School coaches or on public transport, which we encourage. This app helps people with logistics and can result in reduced fuel costs for car-users, as well, of course, as improving the environment more generally.”

“I know that there is much enthusiasm about the scheme among the families of our new Year 7 intake joining us in September, so there is scope to make even greater savings in the future. I hope that even more parents from other year groups will get involved.”

The scheme seeks to promote more sustainable travel methods, in particular by helping people car-share where they feel that using public transport is not a viable option.

HomeRun collects anonymised data on school run journeys, showing how far pupils travel, what type of transport they use, and how much carbon the journey emits. The app then promotes alternatives to low-occupancy car usage for the school run such as:

  • Journey-sharing
  • Travel buddies
  • Cycling initiatives
  • Park & stride (where families living far from a school are asked to park a ten-minute walk away and then complete their journey on foot, bringing health benefits as well as reducing emissions and local congestion).

Finally, the HomeRun app creates a secure, dedicated space for people to share travel information. Those who opt in can connect with other families in their locality, since the app shows people how far away other users live, without revealing their actual address. It allows the School to update parents when boys will be ready to leave Queen’s Road outside the normal School day – after clubs and activities, for example, or when returning from a School trip.

Mr Enright welcomed the grant, which has gone to QE’s Greenpower racing team: “It is an exciting initiative, which is developing skills in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as well as nurturing enthusiasm for sustainable technologies among our boys.”

  • The photo of the boys in a car was taken during a trip last term to the Warner Bros studios in Leavesden, when they tried for size the Ford Anglia made to fly by Arthur Weasley in one of the Harry Potter books.
From waste to space: stellar prize for national winner of competition focusing on Planet Earth

QE’s Paarth Aggarwal spent three days at a European Space Agency base in Italy after being named the UK winner in an international competition.

Paarth, of Year 10, triumphed in the ESA’s Climate Detectives challenge after impressing judges with his AI-driven study into tackling electronic waste in Barnet.

His three days at the ESA Centre for Earth Observation at Frascati, near Rome, included a tour of the facility – “the main highlight for me personally” – and an awards ceremony where he received his prize “with bigger audiences than I had possibly imagined”.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My sincere congratulations go to Paarth on this great achievement: he showed initiative in applying for the competition, perseverance in pulling the project together, and great ability in completing it to such a high standard. And what an opportunity it was to spend time at one of Europe’s leading space research facilities!”

The competition brief allowed entrants not only to focus on climate change, but also on all aspects of caring for the planet. Paarth’s Next Gen Ninja entry was among winning submissions from 18 European countries; all the winners were invited to Frascati as their prize.

“My inspiration to enter stemmed from my deep concern for the environment and my passion for leveraging technology to combat climate change,” said Paarth. “The competition presented a unique opportunity to contribute to a cause that I care deeply about, using technology to address one of the most pressing issues of our generation.”

His study focused on the disposal and recycling of electronic devices, taking into account the significant environmental and health risks if improperly handled. More specifically, he explored the design and implementation of initiatives aimed at empowering Barnet residents to address e-waste. “By understanding how such initiatives can effectively raise awareness, educate residents, and promote sustainable practices, the study sought to identify strategies that foster meaningful engagement and action…ultimately, the goal is to promote a more sustainable future for Barnet.”

Paarth sent out a survey to residents: the results, he said, were “shocking”, with only a small percentage aware of the hazards of e-waste. Problems he identified included limited access to relevant information on a community website. “Moreover, the waste facilities lack specialised equipment and trained personnel to safely process and recycle e-waste.

“These findings highlight the necessity for a dedicated information centre and for a focus on developing and implementing more accessible e-waste collection and efficient processing systems.

“Throughout the competition, I honed several key skills, including data analysis, and enhanced my knowledge of the development of AI-powered chatbots. Working with satellite and local data gave me valuable experience in interpreting data effectively.”

The facility in Italy has over the past three decades collected EO (earth observation) data from ESA satellites looking at factors such as water content in lakes and algae concentrations to understand Earth’s changing geology. Available free to anyone, the data is used by research organisations and government institutions in areas such as: the prediction and analysis of climate-related disasters; rural urban management; agriculture; forestry management; the study of glaciers;  and mining.

“In a workshop, I learned the use of EO data gathered from satellites such as Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3. ESA taught us how they are using the data to save numerous human lives across the globe by predicting climate-related disasters, such as wildfires,” said Parth.

“Being named a winner was an overwhelming and humbling experience. The acknowledgment from ESA, a leading space organisation, was particularly rewarding.”


Use of AI: the technical details

Paarth is an enthusiastic advocate of AI. Here he sets out the important role the technology played in his competition entry.

“Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI cloud environment, I deployed a GenAI-powered chatbot to provide residents with easy and 24/7 access to information when they ask questions in natural language regarding e-waste, helping them make informed decisions.

“I also developed a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an AI-powered app which can: help to detect the waste type through an ML model; incentivise residents for responsible disposal; and allow councils to proactively plan for the e-waste collection, enabling them to be economical and efficient in the waste collection process.”