On Thursday 29 April, five Digital Leaders and Ms Denby visited the Science Museum in London.

The first exhibit we visited was the “Stephen Hawking at Work” display. We saw Hawking’s chair, his thesis, and a blackboard from a 1980 conference on superspace and supergravity, which was covered in jokes and doodles from
his fellow scientists. My personal favourite item was an invitation to a party – in the past. For a documentary on time travel, Hawking organised a party but only sent out invitations after it had happened, to see if any time travellers – which Hawking didn’t believe in – would travel back in time to attend the party. No one showed up to prove him wrong!

Despite getting lost, we managed to make it to the next exhibit – the Information Age. Among other things, we learnt about the complexity and importance of telephone exchange switchboards – it was really interesting to learn about the difference between the mobile phones we all know today and what it was like to use a telephone almost 100 years ago.

My favourite part was the information about Alan Turing, an amazing mathematician best known for breaking the German ‘Enigma’ code in WWII.

Our last exhibit of the day was the Secret Life of the Home. Sadly, due to a lack of time, we didn’t get to see as much as we could, but we learnt some really interesting information about how modern household appliances that we all take for granted have changed over the years. The information we learnt in this exhibit, as well as the previous one, will be really helpful to us when creating our upcoming exhibit for the Prep School about how computers and phones have changed over the years.

After a quick stop at the museum gift shop, we headed back to Liverpool Street Station and returned home. Even though we didn’t have a lot of time in London, we learnt plenty of interesting information for our exhibition.

Barbara S, Year 9