Artists Concept

Bletchley Park Primary School: Anzac Memorial Sundial:

Artist’s Concept.

           
Inspired by the ‘Horse Shoe’ Logo of Bletchley Park school, we saw an opportunity to fuse a series of inspirational themes into one functioning 'Solar Clock'. The result is a truly interactive educational device which doubles as an Anzac Memorial. Obviously, Memorials are all about 'Time', so making time telling as the main feature of the concept links it with both past and present and provides a 'canvas' to mark all sorts of significant dates.

The 'brown' colour of natural metal left to rust is symbolic of battle.

The shape is a 'Bow String Sundial' which is very close to the school ‘Horse Shoe’ shaped Logo which presented an opportunity to form the face of the clock. The horizontal bar in the centre of the semicircle is the 'Shadow Bar' which casts the shadow line onto the clock face as the sun moves across the sky thus marking the passage of time. This is 'Sun Time' which is the real time, as ‘Watch Time’ is artificial. All this provides a wonderful opportunity to involve the school children in learning about a simple form of celestial mechanics. This can progress into the study of serious physics and cosmology.  

Further, we felt we had to connect our concept with the 'other' Bletchley Park in England and the history of the breaking of the German ‘Enigma’ code by Alan Turing and his team in WW II. The fact that the horse, Bletchley Park, had a mother called ‘Enigma’ shows that the connection has already been made. Alan Turing has been officially recognised as the father of both computer code and artificial intelligence.We hope that this little Anzac Memorial will intrigue and inspire generations of young children to explore the amazing science underlying the natural world around them.