This introduction to programming in Scratch uses a trivial example to demonstrate simple audio and animation. It is written for Scratch 1.4 but can be easily adapted for later versions. ...

This game-writing activity using Scratch will bring back youthful memories for some! It provides...

This practical guide to creating a simple game is aimed at those new to programming with Scratch...

Combining some fundamental physics with trigonometry and computer programming, this guide helps students to create a simulation of the projectile motion of a cannon ball. The concepts are all briefly explained, and the program introduces some clever mathematics as well as game elements, such as collision detection...

This edition of the Computing at School newsletter contains articles covering:

*Computing in the national curriculum

*Computational thinking in the classroom

Many real-life situations can be modelled in the form of a network or “graph” of the kind used for colouring in the Poor Cartographer – Graph ...

The students’ goal in this resource is to find Treasure Island. Friendly pirate ships sail along a fixed set of routes between the islands in this part of the world, offering rides to travellers. Each island has two departing ships, A and B, which students can choose to travel on in order to find the best route to...

This resource asks the question ‘How much information is there in a thousand page book?’ It continues by exploring how to estimate how much space is needed to store the information and introduces a way of measuring information content. The resource begins by discussing what is meant by information and how amounts...

This resource for VEX IQ Modkit helps students to understand the basic principles of using blocks of code to create a programme. The Modkit blocks have been reproduced so that they can be printed and used by students for discussion and when planning their code. This resource contains a classroom presentation...

This activity away from the computer is from the Barefoot Computing project. It is intended to provide a theoretical understanding of why and how variables are used in computer programming, using the example of score-keeping in a classroom quiz. Involving several volunteers from the group, the activity uses...

This engineering activity, suitable for children in computing lessons, looks at the basics of flowchart construction. Simple examples, such as the decisions made by a dog chasing a stick, are used to make flowchart representation of algorithms accessible to younger children. A simple design activity requires...

Computers only have a limited amount of space to hold information, so they need to represent information as efficiently as possible. This is called compression. By coding data before it is stored, and decoding it when it is retrieved, the computer can store more data, or send it faster through the Internet. This...