If you’re looking for something that is both fun and about computing to give to your class or your home educated kids we hope you’ll enjoy this Christmas puzzle pack – there are 2 UK and 2 US versions: 2 x A4 (one for UK home educators, one for UK school teachers) and 2 x US Letter size (as before, for home educators and school teachers in the US).

You can treat the puzzles solely as a fun activity or take advantage of the teachers’ notes and point out some of the links between the ways you approach solving a puzzle, and the way computer scientists solve things.

Click on one of the four packs below (or see the info individually below). Red packs (on the left) are for home educators, green packs are intended for school teachers. The top row are designed to print on A4 printers, the second row on US Letter size printers. Each pack is a zip of puzzles + our Christmas zine in A4 or US Letter.

A4 Puzzle packs (top), US Letter below
Each pack contains puzzles and solutions, with links to find out more (clickable in the PDFs, or if printed out people can type them into a browser address bar). The home education pack has most of the solutions at the bottom of each page (cut that bit off or fold it back). So that teachers don’t spend December folding ~30 bits of paper the school teachers pack has the solutions on separate pages.

Although most of our visitors are from the UK (where we are based) the US comes a close second and so we’ve resized the packs for US Letter printers (as we don’t have US printers to be able to check please let us know if we’ve not got this quite right yet).

A4 packs

For UK home educators

Christmas with CS4FN (A4) for home educators: A4 puzzles pack + Christmas zine [ZIP, ~9mb]
- As separate files (though the zip is smaller!)
  - A4 puzzles pack for home educators [PDF, ~11mb]
  - A4 Christmas zine [PDF, ~0.4mb]

For UK school teachers

Christmas with CS4FN (A4) for school teachers: A4 puzzles pack + Christmas zine [ZIP, ~9mb]
- As separate files (though the zip is smaller!)
  - A4 puzzles pack for teachers [PDF, ~11mb]
  - A4 Christmas zine [PDF, ~0.4mb]

US Letter-sized packs

For US home educators

Christmas with CS4FN (US) for home educators: US puzzles pack + Christmas zine [ZIP, ~9mb]
- As separate files (though the zip is smaller!)
  - US Letter puzzles pack for home educators [PDF, ~11mb]
  - US Letter Christmas zine [PDF, ~0.4mb]

For US school teachers

Christmas with CS4FN (US) for school teachers: US puzzles pack + Christmas zine [ZIP, ~9mb]
- As separate files (though the zip is smaller!)
  - US Letter puzzles pack for school teachers [PDF, ~11mb]
  - US Letter Christmas zine [PDF, ~0.4mb]

The short video below shows the contents of the A4 pack for school teachers.

What’s in the pack?

Teachers’ notes explaining how to solve pixel puzzles and how they can be used to talk about how computers store images
Teachers’ notes explaining how to solve kriss kross puzzles
A selection of Pixel Puzzles and the solutions
A selection of Kriss Kross Puzzles and the solutions
The ZIP also contains a Christmas zine which repeats one of the puzzles in the pack along with some different puzzles. The kids might colour this in and send it to a friend to complete the puzzles.

Front cover image credit: Christmas tree in Paris by Peggy Marco at Pixabay.
Contact us: cs4fn@eecs.qmul.ac.uk

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