The team behind Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN), brings you Conjuring with Computation: A Manual of Magic and Computing for Beginners. Develop your skills as a magician while also learning the basics of computer science by exploring its links to magic. Each chapter explains how to do a simple magic trick, step-by-step, then uses the trick to introduce linked fundamental ideas in computer science in a fun way.
By reading the book you will learn to do self-working tricks, be able to hold magic shows, create your own versions of tricks, and with creativity even invent your own. We cover:
The book includes profiles of computer scientists, alongside magicians with links to technology, through history.
Master conjuring and thinking computationally.
Contents:
- Chapter Summaries
- Introduction
- Algorithmic Thinking
- Evaluation and Logical Thinking I
- Making It Work for People
- Decomposition and Abstraction
- Procedures and Procedural Abstraction
- Building Bigger
- Abstraction and Data Representation
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Evaluation and Logical Thinking II
- More on Computational Thinking
- Cyber Security, Privacy and Society
- Advanced Technology
- Further Reading
- Acknowledgements
- Index of Computing Terms
- Index of Tricks, Illusions and Conjuring Techniques
- Index of People
Readership: General public: Those interested in learning how to do magic tricks and lay computing/mathematics/science including those visiting science and technology/computing museums. Those learning computer science subjects (at school or university) with an interest in magic.
Key Features:
- While there have been books on magic with maths, and magic with science, we believe this is the first comprehensively exploring the links between magic and computer science
- Both authors are eminent researchers and award winning for their public engagement work. Their cs4fn and Teaching London Computing Projects that the book draws from have a huge global following including of teachers. This book is an extended version of one of the most popular aspects of their projects: using magic tricks to introduce computer science ideas. This is a much more comprehensive version of that idea
- It will appeal to anyone interested in magic or computer science: novices interested in learning magic, magicians interested in the links to computation, and also teachers, students and the general public interested in computing. It gives teachers fun and novel ways to introduce computing topics
- Computing is now compulsory in UK schools as well as many other countries so there is a lot of interest in fun ways to learn about it and teach it
- It also builds on the tradition of recreational maths and magic and will also be of interest to those interested in lay recreational mathematics/science and STEM public engagement
