These Cre8ate maths activities are provided to introduce students to the fundamental processes involved in programming a computer. Students are given drawings, along with the Logo commands which have been used and, by...

In this Future of Flight challenge pupils design a virtual cockpit and learn to think like a pilot, working systematically to move people and medical supplies. They will also create programs to test reaction times, stress levels and check temperature then put together a...

Sometimes a small, seemingly insignificant, variation in the specification of a problem makes a huge difference in how difficult it is to solve. This activity, like the The...

Encryption is the key to information security. The key to modern encryption is that using only public information, a sender can lock up their message in such a way that it can only be unlocked by the intended recipient. The resource begins with a detailed explanation of the activity and how the process of...

This resource contains four instant maths ideas exploring how to represent data graphically. In the first task students record how long they watch TV, group the results and draw two separate graphs to compare boys and girls. The second task requires students to consider what type of diagram is suitable to represent...

The joy and challenge of building ‘cheap and cheerful’ sensors has a wide appeal to adults as well as children. It also opens a wide number of links to aspects of the mathematics, science, computing, design and technology, and engineering curricula, supporting scientific investigation and discovery. These...

Cryptographic techniques enable information to be shared with other people, yet still maintain a surprisingly high level of privacy. This activity illustrates a situation where information is shared, and yet none of it is revealed: a group of students will calculate their average age without anyone having to reveal...

This resource contains ten instant maths ideas using spreadsheets to solve mathematical problems. Mathematical topics explored include: * solving equations to complete a think of a number puzzle * completion of magic squares * exploring different sequences * the ‘Rich Aunt’ problem * an exploration of cubic graphs...

This CS4FN activity from the team at Queen Mary University of London highlights some issues encountered during the design of human-computer interfaces (HCI). It acts as an introduction to HCI, introducing the need to translate problems and to understand how people behave.

The activities include a robot...

The aim of this activity is to raise awareness of human interface design issues. In a world where poor design is rife, people have become accustomed to dealing with problems caused by the artifacts with which they interact, sometimes blaming themselves instead of attributing the problems to flawed design. The issue...

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 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 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 ...

In this activity children take on the role of Earth observation scientists submitting a request for an image they would like for their research. This gives them the opportunity to consider the possibilities of pictures taken from orbit (and the limitations) and to write scientifically for a specific audience. It...