Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)
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cs4fn.bsky.social
Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)
@cs4fn.bsky.social
630 followers 250 following 330 posts
CS4FN is currently an EPSRC funded project to inspire and educate about interdisciplinary computer science in a fun way. Read our blog at cs4fn.blog. Posts by Paul Curzon. Views are my own.
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cs4fn.bsky.social
Any budding computer scientist should read 'The Machine Stops', a short story published in 1909 by EM Forster of period drama fame. How reliant on computers should we become? How important is dependability? Here is my CS4FN article inspired by reading it in school English
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/16/t...
The Machine Stops: a review
Image by Amy from Pixabay How reliant on machines should we let ourself become? E.M. Forster is most famous for period dramas but he also wrote a brilliant Science Fiction short story, ‘The M…
cs4fn.blog
November 16, 2025 at 5:22 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Here is the CS4FN review of Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. The absolute most fun way to learn about Computer Networking on any planet in any universe whether real, imagined or riding through space on the backs of elephants standing on the back of a turtle.
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/15/g...
Going Postal: A review
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Any one claiming to be a hard-core Computer Scientist would be ashamed if they had to admit they hadn’t read Terry Pratchett. If you are and you…
cs4fn.blog
November 15, 2025 at 11:34 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Shh! Can you hear that diagram?
What does a diagram sound like? What does the shape of a sound feel like? Researchers at @qmuleecs.bsky.social explored how to help the visually impaired through multi-modal interfaces.
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/10/s...
(from the archive)
Shh! Can you hear that diagram?
Network image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay What does a diagram sound like? What does the shape of a sound feel like? Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London have been finding out. At firs…
cs4fn.blog
November 13, 2025 at 9:08 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
How to spot a bad chef when you've never tasted the food (OR How to spot a bad quantum simulator when you do not know what the quantum circuit it is simulating is supposed to do.)
Read latest CS4FN blog written by Vasileios Klimis of @qmuleecs.bsky.social
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/12/t...
The Alien Cookbook
Image by CS4FN from original soup bowls by OpenClipart-Vectors and alien image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay How to spot a bad chef when you’ve never tasted the food (OR How to spo…
cs4fn.blog
November 12, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)
httcs.online
If you're free on Wednesday after school, why not boost your programming pedagogy with my online short course brought to you by OTSA.
#caschat #TeamCompSci #Computing #Programming #PRIMM
httcs.online Alan Harrison @httcs.online · 23d
Book now for my #Programming #Pedagogy short course from OTSA. Learn proven techniques like #PRIMM, #SemanticWaves, Parson’s Problems and the Notional Machine to help you teach programming more fluently in Secondary Schools.
Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:00 - 17:30 GMT, £45. #TeamCompSci
bit.ly/otsaprog1
November 8, 2025 at 5:46 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
It is Native American Heritage Month
Find out about Jerry Elliot High Eagle of the Cherokee Nation and his role in the greatest rescue in history: saving the crew of Apollo 13 cs4fn.blog/2025/11/05/j...
Jerry Elliot High Eagle: Saving Apollo 13
Image by NASA Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Jerry Elliot High Eagle was the first Native American to work in NASA mission control. He worked for NASA for over 40 years, from the Apollo moon l…
cs4fn.blog
November 6, 2025 at 7:27 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
November is Native American Heritage Month
Navajo Code was used for secure
communications in WWII devised by Navajo code talkers it was never cracked
cs4fn.blog/2024/08/11/n...
Navajo Code Talkers
Navajo Code Talkers, from Wikipedia. Public Domain. Bletchley Park, the British code cracking centre helped win World War II, but it is not just breaking codes and ciphers that wins wars, creating …
cs4fn.blog
November 5, 2025 at 9:39 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Crystal ball coupons – what your data might be giving away
(from the CS4FN archive)
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/03/c...
Crystal ball coupons – what your data might be giving away
Big companies know far more about you than you think. You have very little privacy from their all-seeing algorithms. They may even have worked out some very, very personal things about you, that ev…
cs4fn.blog
November 5, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Reposted by Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)
advanced-ict.info
Looking for guidance on how to resist AI mania in schools?
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Resisting School AI Mania Help Sheet
Help Sheet: Resisting AI Mania in Schools K-12 educators are under increasing pressure to use—and have students use—a wide range of AI tools. (The term “AI” is used loosely here, just as it is by man...
docs.google.com
November 3, 2025 at 9:01 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
I just enjoyed reading the novel Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (@aptshadow.bsky.social): a utopian or is it dystopian future where humans have outsourced everything to AI and robots allowing them to live a life of pleasure? Here is my Computer Science for Fun review:
cs4fn.blog/2025/11/03/s...
Service Model: a review
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay Artificial Intelligences are just tools, that do nothing but follow their programming. They are not self-aware and have no ability for self-determination. …
cs4fn.blog
November 3, 2025 at 9:11 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Halloween also gives me an excuse to post favourite CS jokes
Why do computer scientists get confused between Halloween and Christmas?
Why is the number 237 magical?
What did the computer worry about most at Halloween?

ANSWERS

Because Oct 31 = Dec 25

Because it is Hex ED

A byte from a vampire
October 31, 2025 at 9:40 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
For Halloween, read about where fictional Mummies came from and the link to AI
cs4fn.blog/2022/07/23/t...
The Mummy in an AI world: Jane Webb’s future
Image by albertr from Pixabay Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 17-year old Victorian orphan, Jane Webb secured her future by writing the first ever Mummy story. The 22nd century world…
cs4fn.blog
October 31, 2025 at 9:11 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
DNA is the molecule of life. Our DNA stores the information of how to create us. It can be hacked. Read about it for cyber security awareness week...
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/29/h...
Hacking DNA
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay DNA is the molecule of life. Our DNA stores the information of how to create us. Now it can be hacked. DNA consists of two strands coiling round each other in a dou…
cs4fn.blog
October 29, 2025 at 9:24 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Learn about Shannon's Information Entropy while finding out about what makes a good password for Cyber Security Awareness month (with help from XKCD) in today's CS4FN blog cs4fn.blog/2025/10/28/p...
Password strength and information entropy
CREDIT: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com – reprinted under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License How do you decide whether a password is strong? Computer scientists have a mathematical way to do…
cs4fn.blog
October 28, 2025 at 8:45 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Watch the robot that always wins ... at the game of chance Rock, Scissors, Stone (how technology becomes magic)
From the archive
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/27/t...
The robot always wins
Above: Janken (rock-paper-scissors) Robot with 100% winning rate (26 June 2012) Researchers in Japan have made a robot arm that always wins at rock, paper, scissors. Not with ultra-clever psycholog…
cs4fn.blog
October 27, 2025 at 4:51 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
He attacked me with a dictionary: why following simple password rules about adding capitals, numbers and special symbols in a simple way still gives weak passwords (for #CybersecurityAwarenessMonth) cs4fn.blog/2025/10/26/h...
He attacked me with a dictionary!
Image by JL G from Pixabay You might be surprised at how many people have something short, simple (and stupid!) like ‘password’ as their password. Some people add a number to make it ha…
cs4fn.blog
October 26, 2025 at 4:52 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
October is cyber security awareness month
We all need to be more security aware of the threats. Learn about Ninja White Hat Hacking as a career from our CS4FN article and perhaps in future more people could learn about it via fun games too...perhaps you could invent one.
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/25/n...
Ninja White Hat Hacking
Visit the post for more.
cs4fn.blog
October 25, 2025 at 9:31 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Learn lots of Computer Science at the Movies
cs4fn.blog/computer-sci...
Computer Science at the Movies
Computer science and computer scientists have been depicted in films as both heroes or villains, and there is lots of computer science in films including how computing knowledge and digital skills …
cs4fn.blog
October 25, 2025 at 6:00 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
October is black history month
Read about Skip Ellis, part of the team who developed the ideas behind graphical user interfaces and developed the algorithms underpinning collaborative editing as in Google Docs
cs4fn.blog/2022/10/20/w...
Writing together: Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis
Back in 1956, Clarence Ellis started his career at the very bottom of the computer industry. He was given a job, at the age of 15, as a “computer operator”… because he was the onl…
cs4fn.blog
October 25, 2025 at 5:43 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Spitfires and their heroic fighter pilots have always got the credit for winning the Battle of Britain, but was it really electronic engineers? the film Castles in the Sky tells the story of how RADAR helped Britain control the skies.
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/24/r...
RADAR winning the Battle of Britain
The traditional story of how World War II was won is that of inspiring leaders, brilliant generals and plucky Brits with “Blitz Spirit”. In reality it is usually better technology that …
cs4fn.blog
October 24, 2025 at 9:43 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Transitional Automaton
A poem by Vasileios Klimis about choice, memory, and predetermination – in 3 languages: original Greek, an English transcreation, and pseudocode version that translates the poem’s philosophical questions into the logic of an automaton.
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/21/t...
Transitional Automaton: a poem
Flawed cogwheel
cs4fn.blog
October 21, 2025 at 7:50 AM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Sea sounds sink ships
From a past issue of the CS4FN magazine
How some maths and audio engineering helped scientists understand ambient noise in the sea in WWII to set audio tripped mines:
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/20/s...
Sea sounds sink ships
Shoal of fish in the Galapagos image by Christopher Chilton from Pixabay You might think that under the sea things are nice and quiet, but something fishy is going on down there. Our oceans are fil…
cs4fn.blog
October 20, 2025 at 8:03 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Learn how information has been stored through history and ongoing research too in our Computer Memory portal
cs4fn.blog/computer-mem...
Turing machine tape, punch cards, quipu, magnetic core memory, core rope memory, mercury delay lines, memristors, molecular memory and custard transistors.
Computer Memory
Forget me not The processors get all the glitzy PR so the humble computer memory often gets forgotten. It is vital to the way a computer works though. So here we let’s celebrate those whose r…
cs4fn.blog
October 19, 2025 at 4:23 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
October is Black History Month
Satellites are critical to much modern technology, and especially GPS and Gladys West was integral to the development of early satellites and knowing where they are.
cs4fn.blog/2022/10/10/g...
Gladys West: Where’s my satellite? Where’s my child?
Gladys West solved the maths problems behind the positioning of satellites. She worked closely with programmers to write the code to do calculations based on her maths.
cs4fn.blog
October 18, 2025 at 5:27 PM
cs4fn.bsky.social
Shouting at Memory: Where did my write go
How can computer scientists improve computer memory, ensuring saving things is more secure? If Vasileios Klimis of QMUL’s Theory research group has his way, they will be learning from bats. Find out more in the new CS4FN blog post
cs4fn.blog/2025/10/18/s...
Shouting at Memory: Where Did My Write Go?
Image by 13smok from Pixabay modified by CS4FN How can computer scientists improve computer memory, ensuring saving things is more secure? If Vasileios Klimis of Queen Mary, University of London’s …
cs4fn.blog
October 18, 2025 at 7:52 AM