Over the Half Term holiday, nine Sixth Form pupils from the Computing department headed to Silicon Valley for a week of tech based activities in the global tech capital.
The first stop put the development of computing technology into context, where pupils learned about the earliest – and noisiest – computers and saw them in action at the Computer History Museum.
Moving on to the newest and shiniest developments, pupils dressed up in a “clean suit” at Intel,
met the inspirational 33 year old multimillionaire CEO of BOX, created a Snapchat filter in Python at Berkeley,
walked through a super computer at NASA, visited the Tesla production line in a building bigger than the Vatican city,
and experienced a virtual reality game where they fought off aliens.
They also visited an Old Oundelian who is studying for a PhD in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Stanford.
As well as visiting Alcatraz and the sights of San Francisco, pupils relished the best of American cuisine. They feasted on In and Out Burgers, cooked waffles for breakfast, and enjoyed the biggest deserts they had ever seen.