Paul Curzon wins Garriott Award @QMUL for the @cs4fn project

QMUL’s Prof Paul Curzon has won the Garriott Award for Leadership in Public Engagement, for the CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) project.

A sample of our magazines and booklets with the award in front.

This week QMUL held its annual Engagement and Enterprise Awards 2018 which has four separate strands: (i) Public Engagement, (ii) Media Relations, (iii) Academic Innovation and (iv) Student Enterprise.

Within each strand there are several awards available and Paul’s work on the CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun) project has been recognised with the Garriott Award (named after Richard Garriott).

The Garriott Award for Leadership in Public Engagement

Named for Richard Garriott, entrepreneur and astronaut this award reflects Richard’s qualities of innovation and leadership, being at the forefront of his field.

The award is given to an individual to reflect the extensive work they have done in pushing forward the public engagement agenda, and developing others around them.

Winner: Paul Curzon, Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)

CS4FN began over 12 years ago with funding from the EPSRC. It highlights computer science research in a fun, accessible and inspiring way in a magazine (and website) aimed at young people. It’s very popular with schools and we distribute around 20,000 copies of each issue (two per year) FREE to around 2,000 subscribing UK school teachers and librarians. Everyone can download free PDF copies too of course.

Last year, with support from the Centre for Public Engagement at QMUL, Paul also launched ‘A bit of CS4FN‘ – a mini magazine and website for primary school children and their teachers. We’ve just distributed the second issue to our subscribers.

In 2014 QMUL launched the ‘Teaching London Computing‘ project to provide more direct CPD support to London’s computer science teachers and we later formed the CAS London Regional Centre jointly with King’s College London, providing additional free classroom resources as well as our (often sold out) CPD evening courses. CAS London supports teachers in gaining computer science / programming subject knowledge, as well as the best ways of introducing concepts to their classroom so that they can feel more confident and effective in teaching their pupils computer science (from pre-GCSE to A level).

If you’re a UK teacher / librarian you can sign up to receive free copies of the magazine (and back issues where stocks last).