Dr Paul Curzon

National Teaching Fellow 2010 A major part of Paul's teaching is in helping students to learn to program. He believes that learning should most of all be enjoyable and uses lectures to inspire and enthuse his students. He uses metaphors wildly as well as theatrical activities to explain concepts in a fun way. For example, he runs programs on 'computers' made of rope, tubes and students to visualise the invisible computation that takes place when a program is executed. As one of his students noted, he makes "very difficult concepts very easy, by using simple verbal and physical examples... He makes learning programming fun, not something I had thought possible." He aims to infect his students with his passion for the subject. As a fellow lecturer commented after observing one of his lectures: "Paul clearly enjoys his lecturing and brings great energy and enthusiasm. The class...engaged in interactive exercises with enthusiasm." His approach is very popular: as another student commented: "More lecturers should teach like Paul." Paul has taken this teaching approach out of the university and into schools. Universities have suffered dramatic drops in computer science applications. His response was "cs4fn: computer science for fun", the international campaign to enthuse people about computer science that he leads. By taking the same off-beat approach that he uses in his lectures to teaching research topics to kids, it has led to a dramatic turn-around in interest in the subject. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council with support from Google, ARM and Microsoft, it consists of a magazine given free to schools, a website (www.cs4fn.org) and popular school shows. His current project focuses on inspiring girls to take up computer science. Paul's accessible writing style and ability to explain difficult ideas clearly play a major part in its success. cs4fn has a large worldwide following with the website gaining 15 million hits last year. As one teacher noted: "This has to be THE most inspired bit of literature/content for getting youngsters switched onto Computer Science!"