Two new free primary booklets from CS4FN. Sign up to receive printed copies or download PDFs.

We have another two free booklets from our “A Bit of CS4FN” series, aimed at a primary school audience. One is issue 4 of the A Bit of CS4FN magazine (it’s a mini half-sized version (A5, 12 pages) of CS4FN (A4, 20 pages) written for a younger audience) and the other is Primary Puzzles issue 2 (same dimensions). You can download both from the links below and see at-a-glance what’s inside from the looping gifs.

With previous issues of our “A Bit of…” booklets primary teachers told us that they’ve used them in teaching but also leave the mini magazines in reading boxes for kids to read by themselves. Younger kids might enjoy looking at the pictures. The puzzle booklets are also accompanied by a series of certificates to print out and award to your class – we have a certificate for anyone who’s had a go and two versions of a certificate for anyone who’s completed all the puzzles (version 1 is pre-ticked and version 2 has some spaces for you to tick).

1. Sign up to receive printed issues (once printed!)

If you are a UK school teacher or home educator (or librarian) and would like to receive printed copies of these (when we get them printed, later this year) we will happily send you one or two, or a class set. Please sign up here (an embedded copy of the form is also at the end of this page).

2. Please tell us how you use our magazines and resources

For our funders (EPSRC) we are also gathering ‘vignette’ examples of how teachers have been using our CS4FN and Teaching London Computing resources and we’d love to add yours, thank you.

3. Download: Primary Puzzles – Issue 2

The idea behind these is that you complete or attempt a series of puzzles but also pay attention to how you’re approaching them, to see that you’re using skills to solve tasks that computer scientists also use. E.g. on page 5 there’s an example of a Scratch puzzle where you have to put the steps in the right order to make the program work, the accompanying text says “Putting instructions in the right order is called sequencing. It is an important part of algorithmic thinking and programming.”

[Download PDF] [Certificates] [More puzzles, including Issue 1]

4. Download: A Bit of CS4FN – issue 4

A mixture of stories about computer science and puzzles, which introduce computer science concepts, to complete.

[Download PDF] [Download issues 1, 2 and 3 from our primary downloads page]

All of our material can be downloaded from our dedicated CS4FN downloads site, everything is free to download except a couple of books (which are available from shops).