Head's Newsletter 9 October 2020

WINNER OF BEST HISTORICAL STORY PRIZE

SCIENCE AWARDS

We are very proud to announce that two of our Year 13 students, Darshan Kumaresan and Geethartha Vagga have been awarded Gold Crest Awards by the

A massive congratulations to Ben Luca Atassi Quinton for being a winner of the Best Historical Story Prize in the Historical Association's Historical Fiction Competition!

British Science Association, the highest award offered to school age students and recognises the outstanding extended projects they started last term and completed over the Summer. Darshan taught himself Python and then used machine learning algorithms to predict survivors of the titanic disaster using a broad range of passenger data. His best prediction model was the Random Forest algorithm which achieved a remarkable accuracy of 79%, not bad for his first time using such a technique!

There was over 1,000 entries and his story titled, "The Screams of Protest" was chosen as one of the best.

Judges of the competition said; "This story of Peterloo and the 1984 miners’ strike is thematically and technically accomplished and a great read." Ben Luca's passion for history really comes through in this historical fiction read, and the amount of work and research that went into this is phenomenal. This is definitely an accomplishment that needs to be celebrated!

Geethartha built and trained a neural network, also in Python, capable of recognising handwritten digits. He used the MNIST dataset, which contains over 70,000 images of handwritten digits, to train the network. Once he had processed all of that data, his network could recognise the correct digit over 98% of the time.