CNN Inspirations
On Wednesday 6th and Thursday 7th December two groups of Year 10 and 11 students visited the McLaren Thought Leadership Centre just outside Woking to watch CNN film their CNN Inspirations programmes about innovation and technology. It has become somewhat of an annual event for Winston Churchill School to send its students to this incredible centre of innovation and experience an evening of mind-blowing television production.
Students were chosen from the Geography, Media and Computing departments with only ten places available for each evening. On Wednesday we watched Unseen Earth in production. Not only did we hear from a retired NASA astronaut who took amazing photographs of earth, a microbiologist whose photographs and videos under the microscope made profound discoveries but also met Robbie Shone a caver and visual storyteller who through his immense photographs is lighting up the world's biggest cave systems.
Then on Thursday evening we saw something really incredible in the Back to the Future programme. It was Sophia a Hanson Robotics AI robots, who is now a Saudi Arabian citizen and became quite an internet sensation a few months ago. She answered questions, expressed her desire to be able to dance one day and freaked out most people in the audience with her facial expressions.
To cap the evening off we heard from the Linda Jackson, CEO of Citroen, about driverless cars and all the ethical debates surrounding their development, as well as Mark Post the scientist behind the first stem cell synthetic burger. The right at the end we watched haute-tech designer Anouk Wipprecht demonstrate her robotics spider dress that was designed to stop people encroaching on your personal space and also show off her bio-sensing unicorn hat that keeps an eye on what peaks the interest of children with ADHD.
As you can imagine all students, as well as Ms Strachan and Mr Falleiro the accompanying teachers, were left pondering what our future will be like. An enormous thank you has to go to both CNN and McLaren for their brilliant hospitality both evenings. You will hopefully spot the Winston students in the audience if you watch the programmes when they are broadcast on CNN.
CNN Inspirations: Unseen Earth
Friday 15th December at 0900 GMT
Saturday 16th December at 2100 GMT
Sunday 17th December at 0200 GMT and 1100 GMT
Tuesday 26th December at 1600 GMT
CNN Inspirations: Back to the Future
Friday 29th December at 0900 GMT and 1600 GMT
Saturday 30th December at 2100 GMT
Sunday 31st December at 0200 GMT and 1100 GMT
