This edition of the Computing at School newsletter focuses broadly on computing in primary schools, and contains articles covering:

*The new National Curriculum Programme of Study for Computing

*Designing a new computing curriculum in your school; adapting previous curriculum models

*Computing...

In this activity students transcribe the DNA into...

A case study from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which looks at the forensic evidence and intelligence that are left at crime scenes by footwear, gloves, tyres and fingers. New Latent Image Markup and Analysis (LIMA) software provides a fast, accurate way of transmitting and...

This Catalyst article investigates the ideas traffic police use about speed, acceleration and force to determine what happened during road accidents. The article is from Catalyst: Secondary Science Review 2014, Volume 25, Issue 2.

Catalyst is a...

This unplugged activity uses a large model of a face, operated by several children working together, to teach how ‘emotion’ can be expressed by robots following simple rules. These rules are expressed as IF, THEN, ELSE, statements which, when...

At Bishop Challoner Catholic College in Birmingham, a STEM project entitled “Rockets in Motion” took place during the autumn term of the 2010-2011 academic year. The project ran through a series of after-school sessions led jointly by the science, technology and...

Python can launch sub-processes that function separately. Using this approach it is possible to create any number of desktop widgets. This resource includes instructions to create two widgets: a simple RSS news reader and an image downloader for Astronomy Picture of the Day. Some additional Python modules must be...

Published by the Wellcome Trust in 2007, this report is the product of a feasibility study for a touring exhibition to promote creative learning in science. The study involved:

* Evaluating the Trust's objectives for such an exhibition and making recommendations on the
feasibility of meeting these...

This resource explains the check digit algorithm invented by Hans Luhn. This algorithm is widely used for both credit and debit cards to check small errors in the input of card numbers, using the final digit on the card as a check. 

The instructions clearly show how to apply the algorithm, and invites...

Students often seem uncomfortable when confronted with a science teacher talking about mathematics in a science lesson or a design and technology teacher talking about science in a design and technology lesson.

Karen...

This interactive excel program enables students to investigate cubic functions and the relationship between the factorised form and the graph.

The first activities require the student to use the factor theorem to...

This podcast from the Natural Environment Research Council's (NERC) Planet Earth Online collection looks at the cunning tricks the cuckoo uses to get another bird to do the parenting, why researchers are studying snow in Sweden, and discovers an improved radiocarbon dating technique.

The cuckoo is a well-...

Two worksheet based activities that can be used to identify the impacts of technology upon people to sustain their communities in the future. The first activity considers the cultural impact upon sustainability with key questions to research and the second task is an analysis activity looking at cultural, economic...

This Catalyst article looks at salt, in particular the process of extracting salt from the sea in the salt factories of Trapani in Sicily. Located on the west coast of the island, the saline (salt ponds) were probably started by the Phoenicians around 3000 years ago. The article also looks at the structure of salt...

This resource is part of a collection of Nuffield Maths resources exploring Algebra. The demand is roughly equivalent to that in GCE A level.

In this resource students model data measuring how long caffeine from tea, coffee or cola stays in the human body’s bloodstream. This involves drawing graphs, then...