This resource contains a variety of activities and teacher resources to help students develop their problem solving skills, these are mostly through the use of unplugged activities which also encourage the development of skills associated with creating algorithms. The resources consist of teacher guides for each of...

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...

In this activity, learners will improve and further develop their programmable pedestrian crossing system using the micro:...

Machine learning is a process where machines or rather, computer code running on machines, is created that allows the code to develop its own methods to categorise information based on data that we feed into it.  Scientists at the University of Oxford are working on...

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...

This game from Siemens gives pupils the opportunity to design a virtual car by altering various factors such as the type of tyres, body style, engine and materials for wheels. The real-time simulation tests each design change in terms of outputs and how it performs on the road.  Once the design is finalised, the...

By creating their own paper ‘robot face’, students learn about how high-level language is translated into low-level machine instructions. The resource, created by Paul Curzon and Peter McOwan of the CS4FN team, covers sequencing in programs, compilers and interpreters. A detailed instruction sheet guides the...

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...

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 set of  activities from OCR illustrate the concept of concurrency in algorithm development. A teacher pack and learning activity packs are provided. Activities move from the familiar, division of labour when washing up, to the less familiar topic of writing programs using threading in Python. Routing 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 ...

Using sparkles to code flashing sequences. There are variations on difficulty including the introduction of switches.