Our Year 10 GCSE Computer Science students enjoyed visiting the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge!
Accompanied by Mr Marc Hawes and Ms Stephanie Craig, the pupils were in their element exploring the museum and taking part in fascinating workshops.
One of the students, Caitlin, said: “The trip was very fun! We were split into two groups, and my group started off by setting up and programming the Raspberry Pi, where we wrote a programme to rotate the wheels and make a small car move. Next, we moved into the game zone, where we tried out lots of different games. It was incredible to see the evolution of the different games and consoles. It was also really fun trying out the games, which included an old version of Mario Kart and Pacman. After lunch, we went into the main gallery zone to learn about the evolution of memory and storage. The trip was very interesting, and we all really enjoyed it.”
Matthew said: “We were allowed to roam free within all of the retro electronics (e.g. SNES, GameCube, Atari). There was also a lot of vintage computers, with there being an Apple II and an iMac G3, among other different devices. Our first activity was being shown the history of computers, including vacuum tube RAM and “mini computers”, which were the size of the wall. After this, we got shown their mega processor, which was a microprocessor built on a gigantic scale. It was 2 metres high and 10 metres long. The idea of the project was so that the creator, James Newman, could show how the CPU and transistors work. Everything was hand wired and hand soldered. The mega processor runs at about 20kHz with a minimum of 0.01Hz. The programs can be stepped. After this, we moved onto coding the Raspberry Pi’s. The trip was extremely interesting, and I would love to go back to the centre again!”