March/April 2013 - Pershore High School

History
History Exams – A few Tips
Students in Year 11 have been offered a chance to aend revision
sessions on a Thursday aer school. The full metable has been
issued in the Revision Guide given to all students in recent lessons.
Please aend the ones where you feel your skills need the most
improvement. The metable can also be found on the Shared
Area in the History folder. Year 12 and 13 students will begin an
intensive period of revision in lesson me with directed study
tasks taking the form of directed revision acvies.
All students taking History examinaons this summer should
remember that Easter is the key me to begin your serious
revision. Don’t forget that revision should be acve so make
notes, make revision cards, draw mind maps, create posters and
melines, as well as wring med answers to past paper
quesons which are available from your teacher.
Year 10 History Students will sit a mock exam towards the end of
the Summer Term and revision guidance will begin for this around
May.
Happy revising
ICT
CTRL + ALT + PERSHORE
By Jacob Holmes
On 28 th February this year a group of Sixth
Formers went on a field trip to The
Naonal Museum of Compung at
Bletchley Park. The museum is located a
short distance from the actual house of
Bletchley Park, a country residence most
famous for being the base of operaons
for the code breakers of Nazi ciphers
during World War Two. The first thing the
group embarked upon was a talk from the
museum guide about the code breakers’
efforts to break the Nazi’s’ Enigma codes
and later, Hitler’s radio messages to his
generals. These efforts would take a vast
and skilled team of code analysts,
mathemacians and linguists (to translate
the code from different languages into
English) around 3 weeks to decipher.
Thanks to the maths and logical thinking
of Compung pioneer Alan Turing and
technical abilies of engineer Tommy
Flowers, the code breakers were able to
develop the world’s first programmable
electronic computer; the Colossus. This
machine could solve the codes in 6 hours
rather than 3 weeks which really contributed
to the Allies’ war effort. The group
really enjoyed geng to see a fully func‐
onal working reconstrucon of the Colossus
in operaon and seized the opportunity
to take plenty of pictures of the
machine.
The Sixth Formers then got to see the
WITCH computer, used for atomic energy
calculaons in the 1950’s at Harwell and
Pictured le to right: Andrew Higginson, Andrew Aitken, Andrew Wright, Jack Goddard, George Stephens, Simon Cartwright, Jacob
Holmes, Joe Busby, Dan Comber, Aaron Burge, James Wright , Will Clarke, Olly John, Jay Gibbs and Jake Jenkins
then used at the Wolverhampton Instute
of Technology which was worked on by Mrs
Kershaw of the Compung department’s
father no less. Some of the group got to
operate the machine as it was going through
a calculaon which took several minutes for
a simple mulplicaon sum.
The group then had their names printed out
in the form of data on computer punch tape
from a 1960s business computer and got to
play vintage 1980s video games on original
hardware. The group did their very own
coding at the end of the trip by
programming a version of the game
“Snake” onto a BBC micro computer using
the BASIC programming language as well
as geng to see soware running the BBC
Domesday Project soware which Year 12
Applied ICT students will cover as part of
their course. The highlight of the day was
geng presented with a genuine valve
from the reconstructed Colossus Computer
to take back to the Compung department
at Pershore High. It was a real privilege to
see the computers throughout history
which have influenced the digital world we
live in today.
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