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 includes two activities, demonstrating how to read and write to and from external text files. The first example shows how to use Python to create a html web page, which is then opened in a browser. The second program displays fading titles pulling data from an external text file, in this case a '...

Computers are usually programmed using a “language,” which is a limited vocabulary of instructions that can be obeyed. This activity gives students some experience with this aspect of programming. The resource begins with a demonstration of the marching order activity followed by the activity itself, together with...

This activity aims to stimulate discussion on the question of whether computers can exhibit ’intelligence’, or are ever likely to do so in the future. Based on a pioneering computer scientist’s view of how one might recognize artificial intelligence if it ever appeared, it conveys something of what is currently...

A useful handbook for setting up a student-led STEM club, with exemplars from three schools.

It is increasingly recognised that giving students opportunities to act as ambassadors and mentors for STEM subjects outside of school can be of great benefit to the individual, their institution, and to the broader...

This set of Interactive Teaching Programs (ITPs), developed by the National Numeracy Strategy, were originally intended for use in daily numeracy lessons to develop key mathematical concepts in the primary phase. However they can be used equally well with students in Key Stage Three for demonstration and...

This unplugged activity uses a large model of a face, operated by several children working together, to teach how ‘emotion’ can be expressed by robots following simple rules. These rules are expressed as IF, THEN, ELSE, statements which, when...

This issue of Computer Science for Fun focuses on creative computing. Can a machine even ever be truly creative? After all they are just blindly following their programs. Surely that isn’t what creativity is about! But what do we really mean by creativity? We need to...

Following on from the first series of the Brian Cox schools experiments for primary, the Royal Society has produced a new set of videos and resources based around new and emerging technologies. These new resources cover important topics and introduce...

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