This is the full text of the latest newsletter which I (Jo B) email to all the UK teachers on our Teaching London Computing subscription list. Despite the name we support teachers and home educators across the UK and our resources can be freely downloaded by anyone anywhere in the world (though we only post within the UK).
If you would like to sign up to received emailed copies of future newsletters please use the orange form here.
Previous newsletters can be found here.
New free resources
a) Primary Computing booklets
Primary subscribers (please see the green form here if you’re not and want to be) should have received their free copies of our ‘double issue’ – A Bit of CS4FN issue 4, and Primary Puzzles Issue 2. You can also download free PDF copies to print.
If you are changing schools let us know if your old school would like to continue receiving free copies and please feel free to sign up at your new school. We’ll have a couple more primary booklets coming in the new year so let others know that they can subscribe to receive free print copies too.
b) Primary Computing Posters
‘Computer Science Hero Posters’ – What does a Computer Scientist look like? We have 5 cartoon-style posters from Richard Butterworth featuring Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis, Gladys West, Al-Khwarizmi, Hedy Lamarr and Louis Braille and they’re free to download and print.
Tell us your story
We’d love to know what you (and the children and young people you teach) think of our resources and how you’ve used them in a classroom or elsewhere, so please tell us. We’ll also use this information (anonymously if you prefer) in the report to our funders and to help us gain future funding. We’ve created a short form here.
Dates for your diary
- Thursday 5 December, 4-5pm – launch of ‘Elan’, a new computing language “the first new programming language designed specifically for British schools since BBC Basic in 1981”. (To register you’ll need to log in / create an account).
- December, various: Schools computing workshops linked to the National Curriculum from U Can Too.
- Monday 9 December, 7.30-9.30pm – “The Turing Lectures: Can we live with AI?”, free online, £10 in person (London).
- Tuesday 10 December – 5-6.30pm – Raspberry Pi’s Computing Education Research Seminar “Integrating generative AI with introductory programming”, free online.
- Monday 16 December, all day – “Public Engagement x Computer Science Symposium” (Paul Curzon is speaking at this), free, online (tickets)
- 27 – 30th December – Christmas Holiday STEM Bytes (robotics, programming, engineering) from the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, in-person.
- Tuesday 7 January 2025, 6pm – “Who’s afraid of robots?” – Gresham College public lecture, free, online or in person.
Other activities and resources
Merry Christmas from CS4FN – bumper puzzles pack
We’ve gathered together a selection of Christmas-themed puzzles for you to print out and share with your class. Our Christmas pack contains 9 pixel and kriss-kross puzzles and solutions, with teachers’ notes about relevant computing concepts and computational thinking strategies for solving. The same Christmas Puzzles pack has versions for school teachers and home educators, and versions that print on A4 or US Letter sized paper https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/christmaspuzzles/
Celebrating the Arecibo Message
Fifty years ago scientists transmitted by sound a very large pixel puzzle into space with information about humans on Earth in case any aliens might find it, translate it and make sense of it. See if your class can solve the puzzles and have a go at transcribing by ear a short part of the message https://cs4fn.blog/arecibo/
Advent of Code
Now in its 10th year the annual coding challenge from Eric Wastl is back for December 2024. Click on the number to solve that day’s puzzle https://adventofcode.com/
Teach teens computing: Programming in Python
Raspberry Pi Foundation’s new self-paced online course for teachers, with edX. At time of writing more than 5,000 have enrolled. The free version of the course expires on 31 December (a certificate is £47) https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-programming/raspberry-pi-foundation-teach-teens-computing-programming-in-python
New CS4FN article portals
We have a LOT of articles and blog posts about all aspects of computer science. To help you find information on a particular topic we periodically gather together thematically related articles and create a page (a ‘portal’) to link them all together. Our portal collection lives here and our latest portals are –
- Cyber Security https://cs4fn.blog/cyber-security/
- Data visualisation and sonification https://cs4fn.blog/data-visualisation-and-sonification/
- Quantum computing https://cs4fn.blog/quantum-computing/
- Neurodiversity and Computer Science https://cs4fn.blog/neurodiversity/
- Tech Entrepreneurship https://cs4fn.blog/tech-entrepreneurship/
- Computer Science and Research https://cs4fn.blog/computer-science-research/
Keep in touch
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This blog is supported through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.
Teaching London Computing: A RESOURCE HUB from CAS LONDON & CS4FN 