Milton Keynes computing museum in Bletchley Park new star of US reality show

Becky Buck, of team ‘Waywardsons’ travelled a seven hour round trip to the National Museum of Computing to complete a challenge for GISHWHES, created by actor Misha Collins.

Becky said: “I’m a member of the international team Waywardsons competing to win the hunt, we’ve been set about 175 challenges, all of them rather weird, to attempt during the week and we get points for completing them, and extra points for completing them with pzaz!

“The winning team gets a trip to Iceland with GISHWHES founder and American actor Misha Collins.”

The competetors wanted to find how long it would take to fly from New York to Reykjavik, Iceland, travelling at an average speed of 400mph.

Legal Assistant and mother of two, Becky drove all the way from Dorchester to witness and video the calculation on a restored 1960’s Elliott 903 computer at the National Museum of Computing, to complete the task.

Alongside the barmy challenges GISHWHES also has a charitable purpose and contributes to the charity Random Acts which promotes random acts of kindness.

All entrants pay a fee which goes to the charity and teams receive points for showing all-round kindness to all sorts of people during the week.

“I have not smiled and laughed so much in years,” said Becky. “It takes me out of my comfort zone and I find myself doing all kinds of crazy things like running down a residential street in shoes and hat made of pineapple! I can involve my kids too.

“As one of my random acts of kindness, I will be visiting a care home with my kids, dressed as pirates, delivering flowers.

“I had time for only a short pit stop at the museum, but I did take the opportunity to look at the section on the history of gaming and got to meet a rather amazing robot called PEPPER who was in the process of dazzling a group of youngsters.”

A National Museum of Computing spokesperson, said: “As a museum, we receive lots of strange requests, but this one comes close to the top of the list.

“We’ve actually had more than twelve similar requests this week and have been able to help four, it has coincided with our Summer Bytes which is festival with all sorts of zaniness and family fun that runs every afternoon throughout August. We hope one of the teams we helped wins.”

The competition closes in the early hours of Sunday July 7 and the winning team will be announced in a few weeks once the judges have sorted through and scored the bizarre list of entries.