The number of children aged seven and under who are excluded from primary schools is very small and comprises a tiny proportion of children of this age from a very small proportion of schools. Nevertheless, some children of this age group are receiving fixed-period exclusions, occasionally leading to permanent...

This magic trick from the Computer Science for Fun team at QMUL shows that computing is about more than just programming and computational thinking is about more than just algorithms.

A simple mathematical approach is taken with dealt piles of cards – this allows the dealer to control the whereabouts of the...

This unplugged activity from the CS4FN team uses two examples – an insulting computer and one that can play snap – to look at simple computer programming, flow of control and logic. Everything is provided for this front-of-class activity, which would act as an effective starter for a lesson on programming concepts...

In this activity from the CS4FN team, learners are introduced to algorithms in the context of artificial intelligence. They are challenged to beat a ‘piece of paper’ at a game of noughts and crosses. By following a simple algorithm, the piece of paper becomes very difficult to beat. The algorithm is a sequence of...

The twenty seven challenges contained in this booklet are designed to challenge and inspire students whilst helping them on their journey to becoming a ‘computational thinker’. The ideas contained in the booklet will also provide useful teacher stimulation when planning lessons.

Many of the challenges...

This resource uses the version of Minecraft that comes pre-installed within the Raspbian operating system for the Raspberry Pi. As such a Raspberry Pi is required to use this e-book. Minecraft: Pi Edition comes with a powerful Application Programming Interface (API), which allows students to hack and make entire...

In this resource , students can get started and are guided step-by-step through the process of creating all sorts of projects using Scratch including games, animations, quizzes, electronics circuits, and more. Although originally written for the Raspberry Pi all the projects can be ported to other platforms (except...

This collection of resources provides activities for children aged from 4-11, using the theme of exploring Mars as the context. The six activities for each age group of children, allow them to find out more about the...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA), new robotic rover Rosalind Franklin will explore Mars and send back data vital for human exploration in the future. This resource provides activities for different age ranges, which are:

4-5

In this activity, the children are introduced to robots...

Our society is linked by many networks: telephone networks, utility supply networks, computer networks, and road networks. For a particular network there is usually some choice about where the roads, cables, or radio links can be placed. This resource explores the need to find ways of efficiently linking objects in...

When there are a lot of people using one resource, such as cars using roads, or messages getting through the Internet, there is the possibility of “deadlock”. A way of working cooperatively is needed to avoid this happening. The resource begins with instructions on how to play the orange game. The activity contains...

This activity shows how to accomplish a simple, but nevertheless seemingly impossible task -making a fair random choice by flipping a coin, between two people who don’t necessarily trust each other, and are connected only by a telephone. The resource begins with a detailed explanation of the activity and...

Many optimization problems involve situations where certain events cannot occur at the same time, or where certain members of a set of objects cannot be adjacent. For example, anyone who has tried to time-table classes or meetings will have encountered the problem of satisfying the constraints on all the people...

This edition of the Computing at School newsletter focuses on teaching computing in primary schools, and contains articles covering:

*Pedagogy of computing in primary schools

*National curriculum programme of study

*Game design in the primary classroom

*Primary – secondary transition...