[Free] London event: World Logic Day – 14 January 2025 at QMUL (in-person and online via Teams) | Teaching London Computing: A RESOURCE HUB from CAS LONDON & CS4FN

(Also, tomorrow: London / hybrid at Gresham College is “Who’s Afraid of Robots?” at 6pm)

To celebrate World Logic Day QMUL has put together a free afternoon hybrid symposium with a couple of sessions that are relevant to schools and teachers (most of the rest of the symposium is aimed at an academic audience).

The full programme, which runs on Tuesday 14 January from 1.30pm to 6.45pm (in-person and on Teams) can be found here https://sites.google.com/view/wld25/home. I do slightly wish they’d called it “Does Compute” though ;)

From 6-6.45pm there will be a public-focused ‘science outreach’ talk..
Self-reference and Paradoxes: To Infinity and Back!
Paulo Oliva, QMUL
Ever since the Greeks discovered that self-reference can lead to paradoxes (with the sentence “All Cretans are liars”, proclaimed by a Cretan), the fascination with self-referential objects has occupied the minds of artists, philosophers, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists. In this lecture we will go through some other surprising examples of self-reference, including in language, arts and computing, and discuss how these can lead to puzzling paradoxes and to amazing inventions — such as computers!

… and at the various breaks throughout the afternoon CS4FN’s Paul Curzon will be doing magic tricks to demonstrate some logical principles.

Conjuring with Logic
Paul Curzon, QMUL
Would you do a magic trick in front of a live audience if you were not sure it always works? Would you release a program before you were sure it was free from bugs so always worked? But in each case how can you be sure? Just like programs, magic tricks are based on algorithms so they can be verified to be correct in similar ways. By demonstrating some simple tricks we will explore how to prove they always work, and in so doing demonstrate how Computer Scientists use logic and proof to verify that critical algorithms, programs and hardware always do the right thing too.
Find out more about Logic for Fun at https://cs4fn.blog/logic-and-deduction/
Sessions are at 2.30-3pm, 4-4.30pm and 5.30-6pm – I expect these sessions might not show up on the Teams stream and are probably in-person only.

If you know children and teenagers who like magic we have lots of free PDF booklets about magic and computer science, and magic and maths here https://cs4fndownloads.wordpress.com/magic/ (there’s also a non-free book at the top of the page called Conjuring with Computation). See also our* CHI 2012 conference paper “Teaching HCI through magic” about using magic to enthuse students about human-computer interaction and teach core concepts.

*’our’ as in my colleagues, I’m not one of the authors.

Both Paulo and Paul run sessions for QMUL’s ‘franchise’ of the Royal Institution’s Masterclasses in Computer Science scheme which brings ~14/15 year olds onto campus for a series of computing-themed interactive workshops. Lots of other universities and schools do these too and there’s a maths-themed version as well. Paul also runs fun computer science workshops for younger children at the Ri (he’s one of the five EPSRC-funded public engagement with ICT champions).