Newsletter Summer 2010

Download this issue

The CAS newsletter "SWITCHED ON" is published once a term (approx.) and is made freely available for download from here. We welcome comments, suggestions and items for inclusion in future issues. Our goal is to put the fun back into computing at school. Will you help us?

Send all contributions to newsletter@computingatschool.org.uk

ISSN 2050-1277

Web Supplement

The links on this page refer to the articles from the Summer 2010 issue of "Switched On".

Page 3

HUB LEADERS TRAINING DAY

The report of the training day can be found at hubLeaders.pdf

Links to material mentioned in the Teachmeet session can be found here: http://cashubsters.wetpaint.com/

FORGING LINKS WITH OTHER ORGANISATIONS

Alec Titterton, SSAT National Network Co-ordinator for Maths and Computing Colleges can be contacted at alec.titterton@ssatrust.org.uk

Page 4

CONTROL TECHNOLOGY IN THE FOUNDATION STAGE

Further information about BeeBots can be found at http://www.beebot.org.uk/

GETTING PUPILS TO THINK IN ICT AT KEY STAGE 3

Some of the pupil work using Alice mentioned in the article can be viewed at http://bit.ly/a6YEAt

Mark Clarkson provides a sample scheme of work for year 9 using Alice. The entire moodle course can be downloaded. See http://voyager.egglescliffe.org.uk/mwc/mukoku/

Alice can be downloaded from http://www.alice.org/

You can purchase the excellent textbook, Learning To Program With Alice from Amazon. There are two versions. To get a feel for the book you can see the first two chapters via GoogleBooks: http://books.google.co.uk/books

Page 5

SCHOOLS SIGN UP FOR THE OCR PILOT GCSE COMPUTING

The new OCR GCSE Computing Specification can be found at http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/type/gcse_2010/ict_tec/computing/index.html

The online community to support teachers introducing the course can be joined here: http://community.ocr.org.uk/community/gcse_computing/home

Page 6

BUILD YOUR OWN GAMES WITH A NEW FREE RESOUCE

The homepage for Kodu is here: http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu.html

A very helpful forum can be found here http://boards.kodux.com/

To get started try these basic tutorials from the Kodu blog

Page 7

INTRODUCING OBJECTS FIRST: HAVING FUN WITH GREENFOOT

Greenfoot can be downloaded free from here: http://www.greenfoot.org/ where a link to the textbook can also be found. The Greenroom is here: http://greenroom.greenfoot.org/

ENGAGE PUPILS WITH LOCAL COMPETITIONS

Details of the Awards Day for Animation10! Can be found on their website http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Animation10/

More details of the Coventry BCS competition can be seen here: http://coventry.bcs.org/competition.php

Page 8

A MAGICAL OFFER FROM CS4FN

The two volumes of magic can be downloaded free from here: http://www.cs4fn.org/magic/magicdownload.php

THE NEW MACHINE INTELLIGENCE TURING LECTURE

The Turing Lecture can be viewed here: http://tv.theiet.org/technology/infopro/turing-2010.cfm

A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

Project Euler can be found here: http://projecteuler.net/

The brute force solution to the problem is given in pseudocode below.

Set TOTAL to 0;
for every number NUM from 1 to 1000 do
  if NUM mod 3 = 0 OR if NUM mod 5 = 0 then
    add NUM to TOTAL;
OUTPUT total

This can be implemented in Python like this

print sum(x for x in xrange(1, 1000) if x%3==0 or x%5==0)

For this problem, we can reduce 1000 operations to a handful by using the inclusion-exclusion principle, also known as the sieve principle, like so.

def sum1toN(n):
   return n * (n + 1) / 2
 
def sumMultiples(limit, a):
   return sum1toN((limit - 1) / a) * a
 
sumMultiples(1000, 3) + sumMultiples(1000, 5) - sumMultiples(1000, 15)

In Big O notation, the brute-force algorithm is O(n) and the efficient algorithm is O(1) (assuming constant time arithmetic operations).