Viewing archives for STEM

After the School’s triumphs at the VEX robotics national championships in Telford last month, it has now been confirmed that four QE teams have qualified for the world championships in Dallas.

At Telford International Centre, Team Rogue (working in partnership with a team from Haberdashers’ Boys’) were overall champions for the Year 10 (VR5C) event and also took a highly prized Design award. They now qualify for the global finals being held next month in Texas, together with fellow Year 10s in Team Nova and Year 9 teams Constellation and Omega.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “QE has had a stellar record of getting teams to the world championships, but that success should not be taken for granted: it represents a great deal of hard work and preparation, not to mention talent, on the part of the boys.

“It was a truly impressive performance by our robotics teams at Telford, who excelled in their performance, in the awards they won, and, I understand, in terms of the way they conducted themselves at the national championships.”

Team Constellation took a Design prize in the junior VIQRC competition.

Nova won the Innovate Award, gaining their place in the world championships through their high-ranking finish in the Skills Challenge. Team Omega won their division and were runners-up in the VIQRC Overall Teamwork Championship.

Here are all the QE teams’ results at Telford:

High School (Year 12)

• HYBRID: Seventh in Skills; 15th in Teamwork; beaten in the quarter-final

V5RC

• Rogue: tournament winners; Design award; third place for Skills and for Teamwork
• Nova: Innovate award; fourth place for Skills; eighth for Teamwork; beaten in division semi-final
• Bread: seventh place for Skills; 13th for Teamwork; beaten in quarter-final

VIQRC

• Gearsquad: 11th in Skills; 13th in their division; sixth in division finals; won Amaze award
• Omega: eighth in Skills; 6th in division; first in division finals
• Constellation: ninth in Skills; 12th in division; tied second in division finals; won Design award
• Gear Grinders (Year 8): 20th in Skills, 15th in division, sixth in division finals, won Create award
• CircuitBreakers: 58th in Skills, 15th in division, sixth in division finals

Earlier this term, QE followed up on hosting a VIQRC event in December by hosting a successful V5RC regional round, the Battle of Barnet.

And more recently, since Year 12 teams are unable to go to Dallas in May because of their examination commitments, QE’s Team Hybrid instead headed off to the CREATE US Open Signature event in Council Bluffs, Iowa – and came away with a Judges Award.

Head of Digital Teaching & Learning Michael Noonan said: “The standard of competition was amazing and the team had an absolute blast!

“The event featured many state champions and champions from similar élite signature events from across the US. This drove our students to improve their autonomous robot routines, their driving and their strategy. Day 1 featured a new challenge for our teams in the ‘Programming Palooza’, which tasked our programmers with rapidly developing routines for their bots to respond to individual and paired tasks. We were delighted to finish fifth from a highly competitive field, using a purpose-built ‘basebot.

“Along the way we thoroughly enjoyed the Super Mega Alliance, which features many team-building challenges by using pure robots in non-conventional, non-competitive challenges intended to build friendships with those from other parts of the world. Our boys loved this challenge, and finished with a highly respectable second place!

“The competition proper was intense, and had a game every 20 minutes during the competitive phases. Having come in the top 40 out of 160 teams in Skills, we were now free to put together a strong performance on day one, ranking 13th of our 40 on day 1. Day 2 brought its challenges, and unfortunately our team succumbed to four losses. Undeterred, they battled well alongside a team who had been their alliance partner, losing out 39-30 in the round of 16.

“It was then an incredible honour for them to be awarded the Judges Award, making us the first UK team to win at this event.“

Mr Noonan thanked the School’s robotics sponsors, Kingston Technology, for their support.

 

 

 

 

 

Having already blasted through the regional round, a dozen QE scientists and engineers have lit up the national finals of a design competition that challenges competitors to plan for a future in outer space.

The boys were part of the winning inter-school ‘company’ at the weekend-long finals held at Imperial College London.

Competitors now wait to hear whether they will be among the dozen individuals selected for sponsored places representing the UK in the International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) in July, which is held at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Headmaster Neil Enright said:  “This is an exciting competition which looks forward to a future in which living in space is common and which tests entrants’ skills in science, engineering and business. Many congratulations to our students. Having won their regional finals, they rose to the occasion magnificently again at Imperial, working together well with boys and girls from other schools to produce some great designs for a future asteroid settlement.”

The UKSDC is part of a global family of Space Design Competitions running events across Africa, America (North and South), Asia, Australia, Canada, and Europe. These competitions culminate in the International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC).

As in previous years, the UKSDC set its challenges for the national competition in a fictional version of the solar system where significant infrastructure has been built.

This year, competitors were assigned into ‘companies’ and tasked with designing a theoretical asteroid belt settlement called ‘Astoria’. The other schools working alongside QE were: Sevenoaks School, Kent; North Liverpool Academy; South Hunsley School, Yorkshire; Westminster School, London; and Wycombe Abbey School, Buckinghamshire.

Members of each company needed to work collaboratively to create a proposal in 22 hours, summarising all aspects of the settlement: operations, mission systems, structural, business, and human.

The challenges included creating a Human Factors Department, to look after residents’ mental and physical wellbeing – an aspect designed to appeal especially to Biology students. Chemists and physicists were able to thrive with the Operations Department, which took a deep dive into the essential processes required to keep the settlement operational. Jasmaan Sahota praised the CAD (Computer-Aided Design) skills of fellow QE competitor, Snehal Das, who had impressed the judges in the regional finals.

After the teams presented their proposals to a panel of judges from industry, academia and business, the Olympus Mons Trading Company was proclaimed the winner.

Vinujan Sivakumar (Year 12) said: “We came up against some very tough competition and gruelling questions, but after a nail-biting period of deliberation, we won! Most of us barely had any sleep, but the effort definitely paid off!”

Keshav Aggarwal (Year 11) added: “It was truly a great experience to not only attend the UK Space Design Competition’s National Finals at Imperial College but take on a leadership role (VP of Business) and win! Many thanks to the entire UKSDC organisers for their support, my teachers, Mr. Xu and Mr. Brooke, who made this possible, and my fellow teammates. It was great to collaborate with so many new people as part of the extended team. I’m looking forward to attending again next year!”

The QE competitors were:

Year 11
Keshav Aggarwal
Snehal Das
Rithwik Gururaj
Vu-Lam Le-Nguyen
Ishaan Mishra
Jasmaan Sahota

Year 12
Timi Banjo
Karthik Kalaiarasan
Giuseppe Mangiavacchi
Sai Murarishetty
Rayan Pesnani
Vinujan Sivakumar

 

Shown here are QE’s gold award-winners in the UK Bebras Challenge – a competition that aims to introduce pupils to computational thinking.

These winners, representing almost three-quarters of the QE entrants, qualified for their awards after coming in the top 10% of entrants nationally. Among them are 12 pupils, from Years 8 & 9, who achieved a perfect score.

QE’s entrants achieved an average score of 179 points – far ahead of the Hertfordshire and national averages of 112 and 106 respectively.

Head of Digital Teaching and Learning Michael Noonan said: “This was an extraordinary collective performance from our students in their first-ever participation in this competition. The gold award-winners now go on to the next round, called The Coding Challenge, which will be held in School on 24^th March – QE’s 452^nd anniversary.

“We recognise the importance of digital literacy and are keen to encourage boys’ participation in exciting computing-related events and competitions through our QE Flourish programme.”

The Bebras Challenge is organised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in partnership with the University of Oxford. It involves tackling a series of interactive tasks designed to encourage logic and problem-solving.

Distinction prizes were awarded to the top 25% of QE performers in the Bebras Challenge’s intermediate (Years 8 & 9) and élite categories (Sixth Form), while merit prizes went to the next 25%.

Best-in-school prizes went to the 12 intermediate category boys with perfect scores of 220: These are, in Year 8: Vivaan Gupta; Aaron Singh; Rishaan Harne; and Noble Laturia. The Year 9 boys are: Kiyan Popat; Ryan Uppal; Aarush Yadav; Aneesh Botcha; Atharva Rao; Avi Aggarwal; Kian Aggarwal; Priyankan Ampalavanar; Arjun Darade; Arnay Gupta; Advik Gupta; Tahiyan Khan; Darsh Nandania; Aaditya Pimple; and Niketh Putta.

Akhilesh Karthikeyan, of Year 12, took the élite prize with his score of 192.

In The Coding Challenge, boys will be able to choose between five skill-based categories, two using the Turtle Blockly programming language, and three that require a text-based language.

• Twenty-five sixth-formers (18 in Year 12 and seven in Year 13) sat the British Informatics Olympiad 2025 first round. BIO aims to encourage students to take an active interest in information technology. The first round involves problems to be solved against the clock with only a pen, paper and a computer. The results will be released later this month.

A Sixth Form team from QE fought off entrants from other top schools to win the international Ritangle Mathematics competition for the second consecutive year.

The eight-strong winning team from Year 12, called Pioneers, were the first of some 1,700 teams to submit the right answer to a series of three crossnumber puzzles. After meticulous checking by the judges in the competition run by education charity MEI (Mathematics, Education, Innovation), they were pronounced this year’s Ritangle Champions.

Furthermore, last year’s winning QE team, Flexangle, came second.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My hearty congratulations go to all who have done well and, in particular, to the Pioneers team. They demonstrated consistency throughout the various stages of competition, as well as speed and accuracy in the final round, in the process besting leading schools both from this country and abroad.”

Ritangle is open to pupils aged 16‌-‌18 studying for A-level Mathematics, or its equivalent. This year’s competition, launched on 25th September, attracted some 500 more entries than last year. It involved three stages.

For the first three weeks of Stage 1, one question was released every Wednesday. Every correct answer revealed a piece of information that helped solve the final task.

In part 2 of Stage 1, a question was released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, prior to the release of the final Stage 1 question. Again, every correct answer helped participants to solve the Final Task.

Stages 2 and 3 followed quickly upon each other, culminating in the final Stage 3 round of crossnumbers set by website Crossnumbers Quarterly.

Besides Flexangle, a further three QE teams reached the final shortlist, which comprised 16 teams from 12 schools who submitted completely correct solutions within 24 hours of the Pioneers team doing so.

The 12 included not only some familiar names, such as Haberdashers’ Boys’ School and King’s College London Mathematics School, but also Doha College (Qatar) and The English School, Nicosia (Cyprus).

It is also understood that all the QE teams were in the top 200. The 19 teams entered is itself thought to be a record from a single institution.

The prize for the overall winners included individual treats as well as a year-long subscription to the Integral mathematics support website and a trophy for the School. The prize was presented by John Brennan-Rhodes from MEI during Year 12 assembly.

The winning Pioneers team are:

• Aryan Kheterpal
• Samrath Sareen
• Sasen Kankanamge Don
• Hisham Khan
• Adithya Raghuraman
• Danyal Talha
• Eesa Malek
• Nayaenesh Jeyabalan

Runners-up (and last year’s winners) Flexangle, of Year 13, are:

• Anshul Nema
• Harik Sodhi
• Koustuv Bhowmick
• Joel Swedensky
• Shreyas Mone

The three other QE teams on the final shortlist are:

Los Desmos Hermanos (Year 12)

• Keshauv Sutharsaraj
• Rishik Siripurapu
• Rithul Shency
• Ayan Hirani
• Maitrayen Srikumar

Desi Derivatives (Year 13)

• Adyan Shahid
• Kovid Gothi
• Vijay Lehto
• Dinuk Dissanayake
• Panth Patel
• Rayan Nadeem
• Arka Gonchoudhuri

The Homeomorphs (Year 12)

• William Joanes
• Akhilesh Karthikeyan
• Pranav Challa
• Ram Chockalingam
• Yash Kedia

 

Old Elizabethan Sir Demis Hassabis has been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, jointly with a colleague at the AI company he founded and with an American scientist.

Demis (OE 1988–1990), who is the co-founder and CEO of AI company Google DeepMind, receives half of the prize with his DeepMind colleague, Dr John Jumper, for their work on predicting complex protein structures. The other half of the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes to Professor David Baker, from the University of Washington, for his work on protein design.

In their statement, the prize committee wrote: “Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

“Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.

“In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.”

The Nobel Committee emphasised the global impact of AlphaFold2. It has been accessed by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. Examples of its many applications include: helping scientists to understand better antibiotic resistance; and creating images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Reacting to the news, Demis, 48, said: “It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming.”

He explained the “funny sequence” through which he actually heard the news that he was a Nobel laureate. Since the committee did not apparently have a telephone number for him, they had reached him through a Teams call to his wife, who was working on her laptop at the time. After at first ignoring it, she answered it at around the third or fourth call. The caller then requested to be put in touch with Demis, whom they asked for Dr Jumper’s number.

Demis thanked his colleagues, including Dr Jumper, adding: “David Baker we’ve got to know in the last few years, and he’s done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it’s really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”

The Nobel prize committee praised the work of Professor Baker, which he began in 2003, saying that he had “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

The committee’s statement concluded: “Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.”

The illustration above shows a selection of protein structures determined using AlfaFold2 (©Terezia Kovalova/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

• The scientific background to the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry can be read here. A popular-level introduction is available here.

 

 

Three Old Elizabethan entrepreneurs in San Francisco have linked up and are now connecting with other alumni working in the world’s leading centre for technology companies.

Pavir Patel sent Headmaster Neil Enright the above photo of himself, Akshat Sharma and Richard Ou together in San Francisco. The three only discovered that they had the same alma mater through chance conversations, but, since then, they have created a group chat and have been expanding it to include more OEs in and around the Bay Area.

Mr Enright said: “Our alumni network has been growing rapidly in recent years, with leavers supporting each other, sharing professional opportunities and socialising together. Especially for alumni far from home, like Richard, Akshat and Pavir, it can be good to spend time with others who share a similar background. As a School, we are doing all we can to support such connections through our QE Connect social and business network.”

Richard (OE 2010–2015) said: “All three of us are founders looking to build billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Quite a few QE boys that I’ve met in the US have been entrepreneurs, too, all having raised not so insignificant amounts of capital. It feels like we’re following in the footsteps of Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, maybe a few years or a decade behind.” (Demis [OE 1988–1990] and Mustafa [1995–2002] were among the three co-founders of leading AI company DeepMind, formed in 2010.)

“What I am really excited about is more people from QE coming to the US. I think this is the place to be,” Richard added.

Pavir (OE 2003–2010) and Akshat (2012–2019) are part of the long-established international Entrepreneur First accelerator, which runs one of its four programmes in San Francisco. “However, they’d not met until after Pavir’s encounter with me,” says Richard. “I met Pavir at a FinTech AI hackathon hosted at the Digital Garage office in San Francisco. The conversation went something like this:”

Richard: “Where in the UK are you from?”

Pavir: “London, what about you?”

Richard: “I’m from London as well. Whereabouts?”

Pavir: “Stratford, and you?”

Richard: “Highgate”

Pavir: “I used to go to school up north of Highgate!”

Richard: “Really, where?”

Pavir: “QE Boys”

Richard: “Holy sh*t, I went to QE as well!”

Richard later met Akshat at the Entrepreneur First office.

As for Pavir and Akshat, they knew each other through being in the same accelerator, but did not realise the full extent of their connection until a conversation in a Waymo (self-driving car) turned to their backgrounds. “It was surreal,” said Akshat. “We were mates already and were speaking about our homes in the UK and school experiences…and there was a moment of realisation of ‘Wait a second – that sounds very familiar’ when we realised we both went to QE!”

Richard said he realised even before going to university where he needed to be to pursue his goal of founding and growing a startup. “I knew that if I wanted to do it, the only place I could was the US. The problem was that education in the US was so expensive – four years of a degree course can easily be $250,000.”

The solution he arrived at was to go to King’s College London, majoring in Physics (“my passion”) for his first degree and then come to the US for a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania – “only two years!” He worked out some further ways to reduce the financial burden, including becoming a Resident Advisor (RA) – a peer mentor for other students – which comes with the major plus that free housing and food are provided.

The idea for his business came about when he graduated from ‘Penn.’ last year and was looking for a graduation photographer. “I realised it was really hard – there is not really any infrastructure for freelancing.”

With time on his hands, he worked out a plan for a business to put that right, checking that he had a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). He shared the plan with the photographer he had eventually found, Jerry Cai. “As soon as I pitched it to him, he said: ‘I want in.’”

The two became co-founders of Agorum, described on its website as “a freelancer marketplace connecting clients with skilled creatives”. They have started initially by focusing on freelancers who require a physical presence for their work – photographers, DJs and private chefs.

The process has not always been easy. “Funding was difficult at first. We tried raising funds last year when the economy was not doing very well.”

Since then, however, they have been scaling rapidly, and Richard is focused on taking the business global. Agorum was recently valued at $10m.

“I think what changed things was moving to the Bay area: I don’t think there is an eco-system like the Bay’s that exists anywhere else in the world.”

He acknowledged the help provided by his accelerator – VIP-X (different from Pavir’s and Akshat’s). VIP-X is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and caters primarily for people associated with Penn. and Wharton. It takes no equity and offers what are essentially grants, not loans.

“I think one of the hardest parts of doing a startup is the loneliness and distance that comes with it,” said Richard. “Few people can relate.” In particular, he has found the constant need for absolute discretion about his plans for the business hard.  “As the CEO, there is only so much you can ever say.”

“As my role has changed from managing a team of 1.5 people to now a team of ten, the problems are constantly evolving.”

“The thing is persistence,” Richard said, stressing the importance of listening to clients, who sometimes provide the only clue as to a way forward.  “There is something about this gut instinct – and it usually comes from your customer. It becomes your driving force.”

Richard has no doubt as to the source of his strength. “When I look back at my time at QE, it was hard. A lot of homework and pressure. Retrospectively, that is what helped, giving me the resilience I am drawing on now. A lot of people have shared that with me, too. Things were always hard, but that raised your tolerance for a lot of things.”

For his part, Akshat is currently building a company called Orbit. The sad truth about the current digital age is that “we have never been historically unhappier,” he said. “Orbit will empower people by making mental health as transparent and actionable as physical health through a non-invasive brain wearable. Orbit is unlocking cognition by building the first foundation model of the brain!”

In addition to his work with Entrepreneur First, Akshat is part of the first cohort of Founders – the University of Cambridge’s own accelerator programme. He graduated from Cambridge in Biomedical Engineering last year, launching Orbit at the start of 2024.

“At the Neuro Optics Lab [in Cambridge], I developed the first, and only, brain computer interface using HD DOT, a novel imaging approach to track human brain function at comparable resolutions to an fMRI. This modality, being cheap, portable and high resolution, is uniquely positioned to create the foundation model of our brains!”

Akshat has won multiple awards at international conferences and is writing a first-author paper on the subject.

By leveraging the novel wearable technology, Orbit is focussing on making brain-tracking as simple and accessible as Fitbit made fitness-tracking – “all in the comfort of your favourite baseball cap or beanie!” as he put it.

“With each version, Orbit builds the largest, real-world brain data-sets to unlock new secrets about the way we perceive the world around us – our cognition. It starts by understanding mental workload and aims to progress to complex mental states, including anxiety, stress and depression. Each version helps us regain control of a new emotion, at each step regaining happiness through giving us a deeper understanding and control of our brain.”

Finally, Pavir Patel’s business is Outerop. Like Akshat’s start-up, it launched at the beginning of this year. Outerop helps grow businesses online using AI, making it easier for them to build high-quality, reliable Large Language Model (LLM) products and to start creating self-optimising LLM pipelines (a series of steps where the output of one is the input of the other). Its slogan is: “Build GenAI products your customers love.”

Since reading Economics at Nottingham, Pavir has, he said, “done all sorts – from incubating J P Morgan’s first AI startup doing NLP; setting up their FinTech team in Asia (Hong Kong was awesome!) and scaling Europe’s leading broker/crypto exchange, Bitpanda Pro, to spinning off a company with a Series A raise [a company’s first significant round of venture-capital financing] to launching an e-commerce business with my wife”.