The Day I met Professor Brian Cox!!

25/6/15

Today, I met Professor Brian Cox. My head of year leader told me that he was coming to congratulate a group of students at my school for completing a course and decided to let me see him as well as she knew how much I loved physics.

I left my ICT class early to see Brian and on the way knocked on my maths teacher's door, she came with me too as she also likes physics. We made our way into the hall and saw him stood not too far away. One of the teachers who helped to organise the event took me up to the professor and introduced me to him. I was extremely nervous talking to him as he is someone I look up to and we talked about how much I like physics and whether it is something I would consider as a university course option (which I definitely am!) and I got him to sign my book (Why does E=mc²) which was also signed by the other author, Professor Forshaw.

After meeting him, he went away to see the other people. My maths teacher was also dying to see him so another teacher brought him over to where we were standing and he talked to her. I grabbed this opportunity to ask him about nuclear fusion. My question was about tokamaks and how they work. He said that for nuclear fusion to happen, the atoms have to be ionised (stripped of electrons) this means that the net charge of the nuclei is positive (as there will only be protons (positive) and neutrons (neutral) left). The method used with tokamaks is magnetic confinement, this means that they use magnetic fields to contain the positive nuclei whilst they 'whizz' around within, occasionally bumping into other nuclei and starting a nuclear reaction.

It was a pleasure meeting Professor Cox and I hope to see him sometime in the future.

UKMT Challenge

Me and three friends took part in a mathematics competition on the 28th of April. We had a great time doing the maths questions and even though we didn't win (and therefore we won't progress to the national finals) it was a great trip for us all!

The first round saw the four of us (two year 8 girls and two year 9 boys) complete a group round where we had 45 minutes to answer 10 multi-stage questions. It was a lot of fun and we came across some rather challenging questions.

Stage two saw us split our group into two pairs where we had to complete a cross-number. Each of our pairs consisted of one year 8 girl and one year 9 boy. One pair had the across clues and the other pair had the down clues. Some of the clues relied on other clues being solved beforehand. It was a great round and we did significantly better than in our first round.

The third round was the shuttle round where teams were split into two pairs again. This time one of our pairs consisted of two year 8 girls and the other had two year 9 boys. The shuttle round saw teams competing against the clock to get the answers. Question 1 could be solved independently but questions 2-4 relied on the other pair getting their answer right. For example if question 1 was "What is 2+3?" (I would like to point out that it wasn't, the questions were much harder) then the first pair would pass on the answer to the second pair where, in the second question, it would be essential in the solving of the question. So when the second pair solve the second question they would pass the answer to the first pair where they need it to solve the third question etc. Within the shuttle round there were four mini-rounds comprising of four questions each.

Finally, we ran the relay race. Teams were split into pairs once again and one person from each pair ran up to the front of the hall to receive a maths question and ran back to their partner to complete it. Once the correct answer was given, the person from the pair would receive another maths question and give it to the other pair from the same team. This continued until the whistle was blown and all the scores were added up.

We loved being at the regional final and hopefully we'll be back again next year!