Radiumhead’s Race at University of Cambridge Challenge

With an unpopularly early start one Saturday at the start of February, Caterham School’s ‘Radiumhead’ team of chemists (myself, Aiden, Alice, Hazel and our team leader Kayla) participated in Cambridge University’s sixth UK Chemistry Race. As a team, we had been preparing for this after school to familiarise and challenge ourselves with the style of questions on offer, nevertheless, we were all beginning to feel the pressure in the moments before the race officially began at a slightly later start than advertised. Having been given our six questions to start, we tore into the envelope containing them and began with two hours on the clock to answer as many of the questions as we could in the time.

Armed with textbooks, periodic tables and various fact sheets about functional groups and amino acids, each of us began to tackle our questions. As is true for any test, some questions were harder than others; a couple of the questions from the supposedly ‘easiest’ first set of six questions already had us raking our brains for answers. Some of us were luckier than others in the questions we got, difficultly varied on each question which encouraged us to work as a team on the harder questions or left us unable to complete them until receiving hints when left with one remaining mark available. I shall spare the reader of the exact details of each question, nevertheless, the questions we tackled were as fun as they were challenging and had us discussing with each other what the answer(s) could be.  The majority of questions were introduced by some (frequently unnecessary) story that helped introduce a bit of context to what the question was asking however, they felt little more than a distraction when trying to answer the questions. During the race, pressure was built by racing up the rows to judges to have questions marked, then exchanging correct answers for new questions, whilst the timer ticked down from 2 hours to 0 meanwhile, the live leaderboard updated with the latest scores of each team.

Once the 2 hours had concluded, we were dismissed whilst the judges tallied the final scores of each team. Which gave us an opportunity to explore a portion of Cambridge and have some well-deserved lunch. Ultimately, ‘Radiumhead’ placed 24th out of 60 with 88 points, topping both the median and the mean of the scores — this we counted as a victory. Overall, everyone had a very fun and rewarding time, the experience I’ve gained from this race should prepare me well with experience for next year when Caterham school competes again. Hopefully we score more points than this year. Finally, thank you to Mr Keyworth for organising this opportunity for us and being there alongside Mrs Keyworth to support us.

Jonathan W (Lower Sixth)