These paired activities, from Paul Curzon of the CS4FN team, offer an interesting slant on search algorithms and their relative efficiency.

Students are asked to consider sufferers of ‘locked-in syndrome’, a condition that leaves a healthy mind inside body that is, often, completely paralysed. If the...

This is one of a series of resources from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, produced in association with Fairfield Control Systems, exploring the theme of waterways.  This resource involves designing and making a programmable electronic system to control a flood barrier.

Because of climate...

This series of five one-hour lessons covers computer networks at secondary-school level. The objectives of the lessons are:

• Describe what a network is, the difference between a LAN and a WAN and identify three network topologies.
• Describe pieces of hardware that are needed in a network.
...

This series of three lessons introduces Python programming to students in secondary school. The lesson objectives include:

• Creating simple code including the input and print scripts
• Using "If statements" to make a decision
• Using the random function in programs

Detailed...

Produced in 2015, these resources look at the development of encoding messages and how technology and science has developed to allow us to keep messages secure. Looking at unintuitive quantum properties of light, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal and entanglement, students will see how keys can be shared to ensure...

This magic trick from the Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN) team at QMUL is based on a ‘self-working trick’. It includes a set of instructions which, so long as the commands are followed, works every time. It is, therefore, an algorithm.

The trick involves playing cards – the actual value of the cards is not...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a disruptive technology, meaning that it is significantly changing the way that people, businesses, and industry interact. To put it in context, the invention of the wheel, electricity, TV, and GPS are all disruptive technologies that changed the way in which society worked.

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This activity allows students to investigate how images are produced from data streams by using first a spreadsheet and then an image-processing program. They then go on to see how the usefulness of such a monochromatic image may be enhanced by using lookup tables and calibration. The materials used focus on the...

This is a set of five lessons on software development for students aged 14-16.

The presentations cover the software development life cycle and introduce each of the different development mythologies. The remaining presentations focus upon prototyping and testing. These resources could be a useful resource...

This activity from the CS4FN team at QMUL is a metaphorical introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and the difficulties of working at the command line.

The whole-class activity uses a game called spit-not-so. The winner of the game is the first to choose, from a...

Using a set of simple ‘swap puzzles’, this CS4FN activity helps students to learn, fundamentally, what an algorithm is and how they can be made more efficient. Students are encouraged to create algorithms for solving the puzzles which can be used by future players to win, with no understanding of the game, in as...

In this activity students explore why a water clock was the world's first programmable system. Programmable systems are by no means a modern invention. Many regard the first to be Ktesibios's water clock, which was invented approximately 2250 years ago.

The aim of this activity is that students apply what...

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...

This short activity introduces students to the ideas of the footprint and resolution of an image, asking them to choose and use appropriate methods to calculate how these quantities would change as they moved a camera to a series of vantage points above the surface of the Earth