Yesterday the whole school marked Ada Lovelace Day, and what a celebration it was!

All students were fortunate to listen to an inspiring talk about Artificial Intelligence from Emma Dawson, a Senior Inventor and Engineer at IBM. She walked us through her career path to where she is now, starting with the GCSEs she chose to study. She left all our students with the compelling message to think about how you can differentiate from others by using your passions. 

Our partner at IBM Vikki Bradney-Spencer, also introduced our younger students to P-Tech.

Year 7 took part in Agile Thinking workshops in the morning, working in teams to see who could design and fly a paper plane which will fly 3 metres onto the landing pad. They were given a clear and precise brief, had to allocate roles within their team and work to a deadline. Afterwards they debriefed and reviewed what went well and what they could have done better.

The winning team members each received a P-Tech hoodie, presented to them by Mr Smith in the Performance Centre - well done!

Our P-Tech cohort were introduced to Design Thinking by IBM. This is a technique IBM actually use to deliver tailored solutions to their clients. They were challenged to design a chatbot and then had to present their ideas back to the group.

Year 10 participated in a Q&A Careers panel and had the opportunity to ask questions in their tutor groups to a panel of IBMers and specially invited external guests from industry. The IBMers shared their own routes into IBM and answered questions from the students around what jobs they were currently doing in IBM. 

Years 7, 8 and 9 participated in humanities, maths computational and science workshops during the day, all set around the common theme of Ada Lovelace. Years 10 and 11 also enjoyed a Cyber Security workshop.

We hope that all of our students took some positive ideas away from Ada Lovelace day and were inspired by the people they met.

Vikki Bradney-Spencer said of the day: "Thank you for enabling so many of our IBMers to come in and have the experience of working with your students. I have had such positive feedback from them all and they are eager to continue to be involved. You have a strong team at Ada and we all enjoy working together and creating the opportunities for students to grow and be inspired".

We would like to thank everyone who was involved.