Chemistry prize winners

This summer 45 Concord students were celebrating success in the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (C3L6). Concord Chemistry students secured an impressive 21 gold awards (top 15%), 9 silver and 11 copper. Most impressive of all though was that four students from Concord were among only 70 winners of the highest award – the Roentgenium.

Around 13,000 students from schools across the country entered the competition, making a top 70 place an incredible achievement equating to being in the top 0.5% of entrants. The C3L6 is aimed at students in 6.1 (Year 12) but designed to take them well beyond the school chemistry syllabus and aims to encourage university style problem solving.

Dr Richard Beard, Concord’s Head of Chemistry was delighted with the competition success: “This year we were extremely impressed by our students. This was an improvement from last year and amongst the best in the country showcasing the Chemists at Concord as truly inspiring young minds.”

The Roentgenium winners: Jerry, Kevin, Thomas and Hayden, were invited to a residential camp at St Catherine’s College (University of Cambridge).

Students enter the competition for a variety of reasons, including enjoying a challenge and wishing to test themselves. For Jerry the opportunity to try to solve difficult questions along with his interest in organic chemistry and the synthesis of medicines was a motivation, whilst Kevin wanted to test how good he was at chemistry.

For Hayden, who was in Form 5 (y11) when the competition took place, the motivation was to beat his previous score. He had enjoyed the competition the year before: “I decided to enter because I did it in Form 4 which made me discover the fun of Olympiad style questions. I got a Silver in Form 4, so I thought I’d give it another go this year and see if I could get anything better.” Not only did Hayden improve his score from the previous year but he won a prestigious Roentgenium award and attended the summer camp.

Thomas explained that the competition was valued by universities as it showed that students had an interest and dedication to the subject as well as knowledge.

The summer camp, held during the school holidays, provided a wonderful opportunity for winners to explore chemistry further:

“I really enjoyed the practicals in the workshop, as they helped me improve my experiment planning and strategic thinking skills. I also liked the teaching labs and the equipment in Cambridge.” said Thomas.

Hayden described the summer camp at St Catherine College as “extraordinary”:

“We met Dr Wothers who was the lecturer at St. Catherine’s college. He also wrote lots of famous chemistry textbooks such as Why Chemical Reactions Happen and Chemical Structure and Reactivity.

“ We received lectures regarding Organic Chemistry mechanisms, and introductory quantum physics.

“ On top of that, my favourite memory was doing 4 practicals which were quite different from what we did in Concord. Tasks involved determining the formula of an unknown Copper, Oxygen, Chlorine, Hydrogen and Nitrogen Complex using titration and EDTA. We also did one that measured the conductivity of a solution and plotted a graph of conductivity against concentration, to find the critical volume when all the solution reacts.”

All four students are looking to study either chemistry, natural sciences or subjects making use of chemistry in other ways such as medicine.