Presentation by Dom Oram, Yr 13

This morning we were lucky enough to be treated to a presentation by sixth former, Dom Oram. He has developed his own software to re-create the complicated effects of Gravity in a planetary system.



Dom originally wrote the program in Visual-basic when he was a GCSE astronomy student a few years ago. However, since then he has changed the programing language to C++, since the original language was not powerful enough for the things he wanted it to do. He wanted the program to be able to show, not only how different masses affected a planetary system, but also wanted it to show light, colour and texture of the planets.





Over time, Dom has also added background stars and effects to show heat emitted from the planet. As well as this, if you click on any planetary body in the system, you are able to move down to ground level, and see what you would see from there in the sky (eg the sun rising and setting & it getting correspondingly lighter and darker.)







Dom's presentation captured the imagination of his audience, and they were able to ask interesting questions at the end about the program, and how Dom planned to develop it into the future. Dom will be studying physics at (Durham ?) University in September, and plans to combine it with a programming course to help him develop his project further.



From Heathfield Community college, we were delighted to welcome sixth formers (pictured below) Joe Benians, Toby Crisford and Nathan Masters, as well as their physics teacher Ms Waddington; and Mr Howard (not in picture), who will be head of 6th form in Heathfield from September. They stayed on afterwards to carry out some physics experiments after Dom's presentation.



We also welcomed Mr Clive Oram, Dom's proud father, who thorougly enjoyed the presentation.

Also watching the presentation were most of Yr12 physics groups and a few staff who missed Dom's first presentation on 21st April 2010.


Dom Oram (badge winner)