Students Visit The National Museum of Computing

6th Form Computing Students visited The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park is famous for its Code Breaking during World War II that perhaps shaved 2 years off the war. Alan Turing and his team worked to industrialise the code-breaking by inventing the first Computer called Colossus and the students saw a working Colossus.

They also saw perhaps the more important Tunny machine that was designed by a Mathematician Bill Tutte and his team to crack the Lorenz machine that was used by Hitler to send strategic war messages.

During the visit our students learned about cyphers and experienced what an amazing feat it was to invent these machines; they learned how a mechanical calculator worked; they saw the oldest working computer in the world called the WITCH and saw how calculations were performed using dekatrons. They were also given a tour of the museum with all its artefacts seeing how in such a relatively short time since the Second World War, technology has progressed.

Other highlights included a trip down memory lane to play games in the retro gaming room of PC and Console games, writing their own ChatBot to experience how difficult it is to break the Turing test, and programming BBC Micro computers to write a game like students did in the 1980’s. 

A great day was had by all.

View a gallery of the day here: