By Hope G, Year  10

On Tuesday 8th March, four of us set out to St. Helen’s School in Northwood for a physics tournament.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the physics lab was the sheer amount of women surrounding me. In a male dominated field such as physics it is energising and inspiring to see women dominating their own physics environments.

The first challenge of the day was The Experiment Challenge. Given an array of random equipment each team embarked on a mission to create an experiment to determine the earth’s gravitational field strength, we were given an equation involving time and using a pendulum we had to find values which we could plug into the equation. In order to win the challenge our end value had to be as close to the actual value as possible (which is 9.8N/kg). Our NHEHS team got 12N/kg which when using school equipment in a lab is good and fairly accurate.

Secondly we faced the escape room, where the only way out was to solve various physics puzzles to unveil more clues and eventually find the code to get out. Our time was the second fastest of the day, although Ariana claims with prior knowledge of it being timed we would have been much faster. After lunch, Dr Jess Wade OBE gave us a virtual talk on the possibilities physics can provide in career options. Dr Wade also showed us her ingenious initiative to write a wikipedia page almost every day on an inspirational female scientist, in order to ensure an equal number of pages dedicated to women in science as men. The last event of the day was the Calculations Race, which raised our heart rates from both the adrenaline and the running required after each calculation was solved. In order to win, each team had to solve a calculation and run it back to the front to collect a new one. Our team managed to score second place. This tremendous effort in the calculations race, our accurate experiment and our performance in the escape room awarded us second place in the entire day.

In all the day was great fun, mentally stimulating and immensely inspiring. There was no better way to spend International Women’s Day.

Thank you to St. Helen’s for hosting a great competition.