Reverse chronological archive of posts on this blog
- A wearable robot – computer-powered exoskeletons
- The Knights Templar Cipher
- DoodleDraw a snowflake
- Lego Computer Science: sequence, selection and iteration
- Unicode Poo
- Instant 3×3 Magic Squares
- Synthetic Speech
- Film Futures: A Christmas Carol
- Hear and … their magic square
- Sounding out a Sensory Garden
- Film Futures (Christmas Special): Elf
- Scéalextric Stories
- Tony Stockman: Sonification
- Clapping Music
- The Machine Stops: a review
- Going Postal: A review
- The Alien Cookbook
- Shh! Can you hear that diagram?
- Jerry Elliot High Eagle: Saving Apollo 13
- Service Model: a review
- Crystal ball coupons – what your data might be giving away
- Hacking DNA
- Password strength and information entropy
- The robot always wins
- He attacked me with a dictionary!
- Ninja White Hat Hacking
- RADAR winning the Battle of Britain
- Transitional Automaton: a poem
- Sea sounds sink ships
- Shouting at Memory: Where Did My Write Go?
- AI owes us an explanation
- Perceptrons and the AI winter
- Lego Computer Science: Algorithms and computational agents
- Mary and Eliza Edwards: the mother and daughter human computers
- The Digital Seabed: Data in Augmented Reality
- An experiment in buoyancy
- Ammonite propulsion of underwater robots
- Film Futures: The Lord of the Rings
- Why do we still have lighthouses?
- The first Internet concert
- Let the brain take the strain
- Margaret Hamilton: Apollo Emergency! Take a deep breath, hold your nerve and count to 5
- Pots fixing problematic acoustics
- You cannot be serious! …Wimbledon line calls go wrong
- An AI Oppenheimer Moment?
- Dr Who? Dr You???
- How did the zebra get its stripes?
- If you go down to the woods today…
- The Sweet Learning Computer: Learning Ladder
- Signing Glasses
- Sign Language for Train Departures
- Was the first computer a ‘Bombe’?
- Delia Derbyshire: Say it sounds like singing
- The virtual Jedi
- Bits with Soul (via a puzzle)
- Film Futures: Brassed Off
- Designing a planet’s road network
- Film Futures: Tsotsi
- Annie Easley: putting rockets into space
- Torchwood: in need of some backup
- Moon and Mind-Body Dualism
- Bank holiday bunting!
- Robot runners
- Anne-Marie Imafidon’s STEMettes
- The CS4FN Easter Egg Hunt
- Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board
- A Sea Hero Quest to understand our navigation skills
- Robert Weitbrecht and his telecommunication device for the deaf
- Debugging your sandwich maker
- Making mistakes creatively – putting error messages to good use
- You wouldn’t fall for that, would you?
- Always check the text before sending to print!
- Super-plant supercapacitors
- The wrong trousers? Not any more!
- Language-mangling rude word filters
- Google’s “PigeonRank” and arty-pigeon intelligence
- I’m (not) a little teapot
- Broadband, by carrier pigeon
- Music-making mates for Mortimer
- Philippa Gardner bringing law and order to a wild west
- Soft squidgy robots
- An Wang’s magnetic memory
- Aaron and the art of art
- Sue Sentance: Teaching the world to program
- Ancient Egyptian Numerals
- Hiroshi Kawano and his AI abstract artist
- Piet Mondrian and Image Representation
- Maria Cunitz: astronomer and algorithmic thinker
- Maria Kirch: human computer of the 1600s and 1700s
- ELIZA: the first chatbot to fool people
- Dina St Johnston: Kickstarting a software industry
- The logic behind syntactic sugar
- Turn Right in Tenejapa
- Peter Landin: Elegance from Logic
- A puzzle, spies … and a beheading
- Designing an interactive prayer mat
- A sound social venture: recognising birds
- Oh no! Not again…
- I wandered lonely as a mass of dejected vapour – try some AI poetry
- Conjuring with logic: the remote control red-black mind meld
- Adrian Stokes: Internet pioneer
- Herman Hollerith: from punch cards to a special company
- A handshaking puzzle
- Tanaka Atsuko: an electric dress
- Electric Dreams and Solid Light at the Tate Modern
- My first signs
- Join the crowd with swarm intelligence
- Nemisindo: breaking the sound barrier
- The logic piano
- Mike Lynch: sequencing success
- Superhero Syllogisms
- Eating at Quonk: a tough puzzle?
- From a handful of sand to a fistful of dollars
- To be (CEO) or not to be (CEO)
- The Blue Planet?
- Mixing Research with Entrepreneurship: Find a need and solve it
- Avoiding loneliness with StudyBuddy
- Why is your Internet so slow?
- Global Entrepreneurship Week
- Wanna Be A Rock Star?
- The illusion of good software design
- Marc Hannah and the graphics pipeline
- Claude Shannon: Inventing for the fun of it
- The logic of Queens
- Byte Queens
- Sonifying zebrafish biology
- Solving Railway Timetabling Problems with Data Visualisation
- This quantum message will self-destruct in 10 seconds…
- The Teleporting Robot
- Cooking up computer style
- Ask About Asthma
- Working in Computer Science: An Autistic Perspective (Part 2)
- Working in Computer Science: An Autistic Perspective (Part 1)
- Scilly cable antics
- Sarah Angliss: Hugo is no song bird
- Bank holiday fun: website whimsy, and try your hand at making 3D pictures
- Much ado about nothing
- Double or nothing: an extra copy of your software, just in case
- Navajo Code Talkers
- Involving disabled people in the design of ICT tools and devices
- Finding work experience, or a job in computer science
- Photogrammetry for fun, preservation and research
- Music & Computing: TouchKeys: getting more from your keyboard
- Joyce Weisbecker: a teenager the first indie games developer?
- Happy #WorldEmojiDay 2024 – here’s an emoji film quiz & some computer science history
- Art Touch and Talk Tour Tech
- Accessible Technology in the Voting Booth
- The basics of Quantum Computing: Qubits
- Gutta-Percha: how a tree launched a global telecom revolution
- Even the dolphins use pocket switched networks!
- NASA’s interstellar probe Voyager 1 went silent until computer scientists transmitted a fix that had to travel 15 billion miles!
- Coordinate conundrum puzzles and vector graphics
- Mary Ann Horton and the invention of email attachments
- From Egyptian Survey puzzles to computational thinking
- Pac-Man and Games for Girls
- The invisible dice mystery – a magic trick underpinned by computing and maths
- T. V. Raman and his virtual guide dogs
- Designing for autistic people
- Can you trust a smile?
- Testing AIs in Minecraft
- Computers that read emotions
- Neurodiversity and what it takes to be a good programmer
- The top 10 bugs
- Do something computationally funny for money
- Calculating Pi for Pi Day
- Could AI end science?
- Find your own time zone
- The Social Machine of Maths
- Software for Justice
- Designing robots that care
- A visit to the Turing Machine: a short story
- Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 3: the program
- AMPER: AI helping future you remember past you
- Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 2: the controller
- Lego Computer Science: Turing Machines Part 1: the tape
- Singing bird – a human choir, singing birdsong
- Eggheads: helping us to visualise objects and classes
- Ethics – What would you do?
- Collaborative community coding & curating
- CS4FN Advent Calendar – Day 25 bonus Christmas crackers: have you ever seen this cracker joke?
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 25: Merry Christmas! Today’s post is about the ‘wood computer’
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 24: Santa’s Sleigh – track its progress through the skies
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 23: Bonus material – see “Santa’s sleigh” flying overhead
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 23: Father Christmas – checking his list, spotting the errors
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 22: wreaths and rope memory – weave your own space age computer
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 21: stars and celestial navigation
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 20: where’s it @? Gift tags and internet addresses
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 19: jingle bells or warning bells? Avoiding computer scams
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 18: cracker or hacker? Cyber security
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 17: pocket-switching networked reindeer
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 16: candy cane or walking aid: designing for everyone, human computer interaction
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 15: a candle: optical fibre, optical illusions
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 14: Why is your internet so slow + a festive kriss-kross puzzle
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 13: woolly hat: warming versus cooling
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 12: Computer Memory – Molecules and Memristors
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 11: the proof of the pudding… mathematical proof
- Virtual reality goggles for mice
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 10: #AI – Holly, Ivy and Alexa – chatbots & the useful skill of file management. Plus win at noughts and crosses
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 9: gingerbread man – computing and ‘food’ (cookies, spam!), and a puzzle
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 8: gifts, and wrapping – Tim Berners-Lee, Right to Repair & another computing puzzle
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 7: Computing for the birds: dawn chorus, birds as data carriers and a Google April Fool (plus a puzzle!)
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 6: patterned bauble: tracing patterns in computing – printed circuit boards, spotting links and a puzzle for tourists
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 5: snowman: analog hydraulic computers (aka water computers), digital compression, and a puzzle
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 4: Ice skate: detecting neutrinos at the South Pole, figure-skating motion capture, Frozen and a puzzle
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 3: snowflakes – make your own six-sided HexaHexaFlexagon with our templates
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 2: Pairs: mittens, gloves, pair programming, magic tricks
- CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 1: Woolly jumpers, knitting and coding
- Cartoons, comics and computer games – Ada Lovelace’s graphic novel
- Blade: the emotional computer.
- Exploring mazes, inventing algorithms (part I)
- Why the Romans were pants at maths
- Beheading Hero’s mechanical horse
- How far can you hear? Modelling distant birdsong.
- Threads & Yarns – textiles and electronics
- 3D models in motion
- Frequency Analysis for Fun
- Keeping secrets on the Internet – encryption keeps your data safe
- Composing from Compression
- Balls, beams and quantum computers – performing calculations with patterns of light
- Getting off the beach, fast
- “A mob for the Earth”
- Competitive Zen
- Pit-stop heart surgery
- Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part II: Authentication)
- Happy World Emoji Day – 📅 17 July 2023 – how people use emoji to communicate and what it tells us about them 😀
- Cyber Security at the movies: Rogue one (Part I: Physical Security)
- When a chatbot acts as your “trusted” agent …
- Nurses in the mist
- Negligent nurses? Or dodgy digital? – device design can unintentionally mask errors
- Screaming Headline Kills!!!
- Putting your hand up a cow’s bottom
- Bitten blue
- Creating great game worlds
- Hallucinating chatbots
- Protecting your fridge
- The gender shades audit
- Playing the weighting game
- Collecting mini-beasts and pocket monsters
- “Tlahcuilo”, a visual composer
- Follow those ants
- The first computer wizard
- A Godlike Heart
- Mary Clem: getting it right
- Black in Data
- Reclaim your name
- Al-Jazari: the father of robotics
- Mark Dean: A PC Success
- In space no one can hear you …
- The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
- Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics!
- The tale of the mote and the petrel
- Fran Allen: Smart Translation
- A gendered timeline of technology
- Operational Transformation
- Engineering a cloak of invisibility: manipulating light with metamaterials
- Alexander Graham Bell: It’s good to talk
- Manufacturing Magic
- Solving problems you care about
- Sameena Shah: News you can trust
- Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
- Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY
- Is ChatGPT’s “CS4FN” article good enough?
- Understanding Parties
- A machine wrote this post – OpenAi’s ChatGPT
- Mood Gloves
- What the real Pros say
- Susan Kare: Icon Draw
- Celebrating Jean Bartik: 1940s programmer
- What’s that bird? Ask your phone – birdsong-recognition apps
- Inspiring Wendy Hall
- Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
- Marissa Mayer: Lemons Linking 41 Shades of Blue – A/B Testing
- Opinions, Opinions, Opinions
- Joyce Wheeler: The Life of a Star
- The Devil is in the Detail: Lessons from Animal Welfare? (Temple Grandin)
- Ingrid Daubechies: Wiggly lines help catching crime
- Mark Dean: An Inspiration
- 100,000 frames – quick draw: how computers help animators create
- Edie Schlain Windsor and same sex marriage
- Understanding matters of the heart – creating accurate computer models of human organs
- The Dark History of Algorithms
- Lego Computer Science: Logic with Truth Tables
- Lego Computer Science: Truth Tables
- Jacquie Lawson: the multi-million pound greeting
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: tautology and truth tables
- Alan Turing’s life
- Cognitive crash dummies
- Chatbot or Cheatbot?
- Daphne Oram: the dawn of music humans can’t play
- Kimberly Bryant: Black Girls Code
- Bringing people closer when they’re far away
- Hedy Lamarr: The movie star, the piano player and the torpedo
- Gary Starkweather: the laser printer and colour management
- Lynn Conway: revolutionising chip design
- Sorry to bug you: Grace Hopper
- The first computer music
- Swat a way to drive
- Future Friendly: Focus on Kerstin Dautenhahn
- The last speaker
- The joke Turing test
- The Chinese room: zombie attack!
- The paranoid program
- How does Santa do it?
- Pepper’s Ghost: an 1860s illusion used in ‘head-up displays’
- Making sense of squishiness – 3D modelling the natural world
- Watching whales well – the travelling salesman problem
- Recognising (and addressing) bias in facial recognition tech #BlackHistoryMonth
- Happy Hallowe’en
- Devices that work for everyone
- Facing up to ALL faces
- Hidden Figures: NASA’s brilliant calculators
- Writing together: Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis
- Mark Dean: An Inspiration
- Freddie Figgers – the abandoned baby who became a runaway telecom tech star
- Gladys West: Where’s my satellite? Where’s my child?
- Kakuro, Logic and Computer Science
- Cold hard complexity: learning to talk in nature’s language
- Love your data
- Delicious computing
- Hiding in Skype
- Naked Mole-Rats Go Digital – monitoring colonies remotely (while respecting their privacy)
- The heart of an Arabic programming language
- Escape from Egypt
- Chocoholic Subtraction
- Chocolate Turing Machines (edible computing)
- Microwave health check
- Microwave Racing
- Can a computer tell a good story?
- Patterns for Sharing
- Your own electrical sea
- Playing Bridge, but not as we know it – the sound of the Human Harp
- Strictly Judging Objects
- Cryptography: You are what you know
- Cryptography: Shafi Goldwasser and the Zero Knowledge Proof
- The First Law of Humans
- Dressing it up
- The Mummy in an AI world: Jane Webb’s future
- The naked robot
- Lego computer science: What is computation? (simple cellular automata)
- Shirts that keep score
- More Encrypted Deckchairs
- Full metal jacket: the fashion of Iron Man
- Lego computer science: binary
- Let buttons be buttons
- Encrypted Deckchairs
- Back (page) to the drawing board
- Tempest Prognosticator: look out, leeches!
- Quipu: tie a knot in it
- Bullseye! The intelligent dart board
- The Ultimate (do nothing) machine
- Simone Giertz: A pat on the shoulder
- Christopher Strachey and the secret of being a Wizard Debugger
- Sophie Wilson: Where would feeding cows take you?
- The Hive at Kew
- The beach, the missionary and my origin myth
- Hoverflies: comin’ to get ya
- Edge-notched cards and relational databases
- The Wood Computer
- Babbage’s barrels
- Ada and the music machine
- Ant Art
- Ant Track Algorithms
- Diamond Dogs: Bowie’s algorithmic creativity
- The algorithm that could not speak its name
- I Ching binary
- Predicting the future: marble runs, binary and the I Ching
- Mary Coombs, teashops and Leo the computer
- A custard computer
- The taming of the screw
- Quicksilver memory
- A storm in a bell jar
- Pass the screwdriver, Igor
- Babbage’s triumph over brutal reality
- Nikola Tesla: the invisible genius
- Babbage’s Adders
- Making core rope memory
- Core rope memory
- An ode to technology
- Swallow a slug-bot to catch a …
- “The thundering engines vibrate throughout your body”
- If the Beagle had landed…
- Fencing the moon
- Ada Lovelace in her own words
- Dickens knitting in code
- Understanding Ultron: A Turing test for world domination
- April Fooling with computing – IP over avian carriers, PigeonRank
- A Wookie for three minutes please
- The cure that just folds away
- Executable Biology
- Lego computer science: Gray code
- Lego computer science: representing numbers using position
- Lego computer science: representing numbers
- Lego computer science: compression algorithms
- Lego computer science: pixel pictures
- CS4FN Advent Calendar – bonus material: HexaFestiveFlexagons to make and colour in
- Meet the chatbots
- How to get a head in robotics
- The machines can translate now
- Letters from the Victorian Smog: Braille: binary, bits & bytes
- Only the fittest slogans survive!
- What are birds actually saying?
- Stopping sounds getting left behind: the Bela computer
- Ada Lovelace: Visionary
- I know where your cat lives
- The red sock of doom – trying to catch mistakes before they happen
- Playing Tantrix: P=NP?
- Emoticons and Emotions
- Knitters and Coders: separated at birth?
- Die another Day? Or How Madonna crashed the Internet
- The Emoji Crystal Ball
- Back (page) to health
- Gadgets based on works of fiction
- How do you solve a problem like arthritis?
- Are you there yet?
- So, so tired…
- Is your healthcare algorithm racist?
- Solving real problems with Bayesian networks
- Diagnose? Delay delivery? Decisions, decisions. Decisions about diabetes in pregnancy
- Bayes’ theorem as an algorithm
- Cloudy with a chance of pain
- A simple Bayesian network for having a virus
- Here
- A graphical explanation of Bayes theorem
- What are the chances of that? The church minister’s hobby and clever machines
- The ping pong vaccination programming challenge
- Smart health: decisions, decisions, decisions
- I’m feeling Moo-dy today
- Standup Robots
- Sabine Hauert: Swarm Engineer
- What’s on your mind?
- In a New York nanosecond
- Hiding in Elizabethan Binary
- The optical pony express
- Smart bags
- Punk robots learn to pogo
- The computer vs the casino: Wearable tech cheating
- Sick tattoos
- One in the eye for wearable tech
- Smart tablets (to swallow)
- i-pickpocket
- AI Detecting the Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls
- Losing the match? Follow the science. Change the kit!
- DragonflyAI: I see what you see
- Studying Comedy with Computers
- Every Breath You Take: Reclaim the Internet
- Why would you accept inefficiency?
- The Cyber-Security Honeypot
- The very first computers
- A recipe for programming
- Florence Nightingale: rebel with a cause
- The Tactful Watch
- HMS Belfast: destroying the destroyer
- Machines Inventing Musical Instruments
- Return of the killer robot? Evil scientist?! Helpless woman?!?
- Who invented Morse code?
- Cyber Security at the Movies: Guardians of the Galaxy (Fail Secure security)