Lower and Middle School Project winners

Congratulations to three students who won prizes for the Lower and Middle School Projects they completed at the end of last year.  

First Year Rau Deshpande’s winning project was titled Imagine if…all humans spoke the same language; Fifth Year Karson Cheng’s project was Imagine the possibilities of combining human intuition with the vast computational knowledge of AI in the music industry; and the third winning project by Fifth Year Ayan Eswaran was a coding project entitled Imagine If AI Could Revolutionize the Future for Everyone. Read more on their projects below.   

The Lower and Middle School Projects are part of our enrichment programme, and they encourage students to investigate what they’re passionate about beyond the classroom. Students pursue a project independently, and last year the theme was ‘Imagine if…’ which tied into our theme for the Summer Term’s Festival of Ideas. Over the years students have submitted in various formats including websites, games, coding projects, cartography, musical scores, economics journals, drama presentations as well as many fascinating essays. 

Mr Hardman, Director of Teaching and Learning, said, “The judges were all extremely impressed with the creativity, dedication, and scholarship that the projects exhibited. One of our core messages to our pupils is that learning is a lifelong endeavour, and it was wonderful to see so many entries across a broad range of academic interests. The projects are designed to inculcate the independent research skills that are so highly valued by universities and employers, and that become increasingly important in A Levels and EPQs. We look forward to watching these students continue to thrive and embrace scholarship as they progress through the school.” 

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Rau said, “I got the inspiration in the middle of last year, as I had to pick which languages to pursue after JBugs. It made me wonder why we all couldn’t speak the same one language, so I did some research on that. 

“Once, I had decided on my topic I needed to look at it from the past, present and future. I looked into ancient languages where all languages evolved from, for example Sanskrit; I looked into the future to see how languages can change and considering how programming languages might change our way of speaking; finally I looked at now and how most of the old writing scripts have been destroyed and how Putney High is using python as a language option. 

“I feel proud as I put a lot of effort into thinking about the different ways I could present my idea, so I am quite happy that I won the award.” 

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Karson said, “Recently, there has been a lot of news surrounding the advancement of AI. I wanted to explore the impact it might have on workforces, whereby automation is replacing human workers, especially for routine and low-skilled jobs. This led me to enquire: Will the extraordinary development of AI lead to the replacement of creative jobs such as artists in the music industry? Since AI has proven to have ingenious usefulness, like writing computer code and composing essays, what are the innovative possibilities of integrating it in the music industry and are there issues concerning AI completely replacing human musical artists? 

“I found the whole process very stimulating, as the theme of ‘Imagine if…’ was so wide that you can think beyond the boundaries and let your mind wander, there were no limits! This made the decision of my topic difficult to make, I eventually settled on one that I thought would be captivating to delve into.  

“I was very surprised and ecstatic that I won, the high calibre of students participating meant that the competition was strong. It was great to have my subject matter recognised as it is highly relevant to our current and future generations.”   

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Ayan said, “The inspiration for my topic came from an online course I did. I enjoy programming, and I feel that AI has a lot of potential. I’m fascinated with the idea that computers can be programmed to notice trends in data and even understand language and pictures. Furthermore, neural networks begin to mimic how the human brain works, so I wanted to see how that works in code and explain it to others. 

“The ‘Imagine’ theme led me to consider what the world might be like when a lot of work can be done by machines. I hope this will benefit everyone and take humanity forward.  

“I am pleased to have won because I learnt a lot while working on this project and code. There are so many ways to improve a machine learning model; regularisation, for instance, applies a penalty to the input parameters with large coefficients, so the model is not made unnecessarily complex.”