On Wednesday 15th May, year 10 Computing students visited The National Museum Of Computing located in Bletchley park.

Lucas Cosier reports “We started the day by splitting up into two groups and doing 2 activities in the morning, and two in the afternoon. My group’s first activity was understanding the Turing test which was if a computer deceives you into thinking it is a human then it is an “intelligent computer”. Then we had a look at the computer systems from the 1940’s to the 21st century where we looked at the morse code the British and Germans used to communicate in the second world war.

Saladeen Khodabocus adds “We were taken to the Arcade game section to appreciate previous devices that were used to operate old game systems in the 19th and 20th century. As we were introduced to the area we were also told that we were able to play/test out some of the game systems. It was a really interesting experience for everyone. Shortly after this session, we jumped straight into an old coding session, where we were informed that people from the 20th century used to type out lines of codes found on newspapers to play games. From this point forward we were given 17 lines of code that we had to type out with no errors to play the game allocated to the code. Many people attempted to write the full 17 lines of code but had no further luck.”

Thomas Roadknight comments “It was great seeing the WITCH computer – the oldest computer in the world originating in a nuclear power plant performing calculations. We also tried our hand at coding an 80’s game of python, if we made just one mistake our code would have needed to start from scratch.”

Tejan Mistry writes “My favourite part of the day was where we got to try out playing retro games such as Sonic. There were many games to choose from. We also got to see the oldest operating computer work and solve maths equations.”

Dominic Karys comments “During the Bletchley Park trip my group used BBC micro computers, which are computers that were made in 1981 to code a game of Snake. This was particularly challenging as the layout of the keyboards were different to what we usually use, and you couldn’t return to your previous line of writing and if you made a mistake you had to retype the line. But overall it was fun and was a great experience. If you were offered the trip you should go.”