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49 Merchant Taylors’ Prep School Newsletter - 15.03.2019 MTP IT Computing News March 2019 It’s been an exciting few months for pupils studying Computing. Boys in Reception have been exploring robotics, using the Bee-Bots and their activity mats. They have also experimented with Augmented Reality, seeing masks they made transported digitally onto the faces of other pupils (and even their teacher)! Further up the school, Year 2 have been honing their coding skills, using a variety of apps designed to help pupils build effective mental models of how computers work. An example of this, shown here, is an app called Code Spark. It enables the boys to explore quite sophisticated computational methods, via a non-verbal visual environment. Meanwhile, 24 boys from Years 6 to 8 came within the top ten percent nationally, in the annual Bebras computational thinking challenge. This tests their ability to grapple with increasingly challenging computer based problems. Consequently, the boys were invited by Oxford University to take part in their new computing competition, aimed at the most able computational thinkers in British schools. This saw the pupils undertake a very difficult set of online questions. At the time of writing we are waiting to hear the results. The good news is that, once selected, boys can enter each year until they leave school. Here’s to next year! Sacha van Straten Head of ICT Oxford Computing Challenge Tackling the TCS Oxford Computing Challenge Reception boys with a Beebot