After a year-long Covid-imposed hiatus we’re delighted 🥳 🎉 that things are moving speedily towards publishing and distributing the next issue of CS4FN, the free computing magazine for schools from the Computer Science department at Queen Mary University of London.

Issue 27, due in June 2021, will be on Smart Health and all our back issues (and other booklets) can be downloaded free as PDFs here https://cs4fndownloads.wordpress.com/

After such a long wait we thought it was a good opportunity to check our mailing list with a finetooth comb and make sure everyone’s address was correct, and that they were receiving the copies that they want.

There are about 2,400 subscribers on our list and we send approx 24,000 copies out to them (some want 1, some a class set of 30, some a bigger number). We try and make sure everyone gets what they request but with a mailing list that’s been in existence for 16 years it makes sense to check it occasionally.

You might be getting an email from me (Admin Jo) to check that you are still at the school you’re subscribed with, particularly where a school has several teachers subscribed.

Of course if you or your school isn’t yet subscribed to receive free copies of CS4FN please sign up (using the purple form) here: https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/sign-up/

Finding duplicates (in some cases triplicates) isn’t always easy as people write their school’s name in different ways – compare St. Trinians, Saint Trinian’s, or St Trinian’s. An easily made typo in a postcode – 1AA 1AB versus 1AA 1BA can also hide duplication, and people move on to different schools. So it’s a delicate procedure and may take some time to get round to everyone.

Also, there is the ever-present possibility of me making a mistake somewhere…

My daftest error so far was when I decided to Find & Replace all instances of “UK” for “United Kingdom”. This would have gone very well had I restricted my manipulations only to the Country column but, alas, anyone called Luke or working at a school called St Luke’s or whose address was Duke Road etc ended up with an incomprehensible address.

I only realised when mail began to be returned with addresses like ‘DUnited Kingdome Road” on it. A cautionary example of verschlimmbesserung, or ‘disimprovementing’ – when one intends to improve something but ends up making it worse.

See also this example of ‘fixing a bug’ from Malcolm in the Middle ;)