During lockdown, many of our students using their time productively by building their skillset through online learning platforms and courses, Poppy Phillips (Year 9) has been doing just that. She has enrolled on the CS50 for Lawyers course at the prestigious Harvard University.    

We spoke to Poppy about the course, she said: “At the beginning of lockdown, I started taking an online Harvard course called CS50 for Lawyers. Across 10 modules, it covers aspects of computer science such as cryptography and cybersecurity and the laws and philosophical views focused around these, for example, voice-activated passwords, the ethics of artificial intelligence and data collection.

“I decided to do this as in the future I’d love to go on to practice law surrounding white-collar crime and financial fraud, maybe one day actually attending Harvard myself. By taking this course I have learnt a lot of skills that I can take forward into my school work, such as the process of abstraction and how to think computationally and I am looking forward to applying this new knowledge.”

Mr Potter (Director of Digital Strategy), said: “Poppy is one of our hard working computer scientists, fond of a tricky problem to solve and is preparing to study the subject at GCSE. She has been very inventive during lockdown by enrolling on the computer science/law based online course from Harvard University.”