You may recall that I reviewed a book called The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. It's a brilliant book, and I am able to announce a fantabulous competition to win a copy. A hard copy too, not one of those digital Kindle thingamajigs. (I love my Kindle really!).

All you have to do (a) send me an email with the subject heading Lovelace, and (b) not live in the USA. (Sorry, it's because of copyright issues. But there's a competition that you can enter just below.) Oh, and (c) get it to me by midnight GMT on 10th January 2016. That should give you enough time to sober up. I will then take all the emails and put them into a hat called Excel, and metaphorically draw not one, not two, but three names at random.

Now, here's some important information. I don't have the books with me: they will be sent by someone at Penguin. So you need to include your name and snail mail address in your email, and by doing so you will be granting me permission to pass on those details to Penguin.

One entry per person please, otherwise you'll be disqualified.

Digital Education

This competition first appeared in Digital Education, which is a free newsletter. Every issue features resources, news, views and reviews, longer-than-usual articles and guest contributions, plus you get access to some free subscriber-only resources.

Is The computing Curriculum Too Masculine? Revisited 16 years later!

One of the apparently insoluble problems of the age is how do you encourage more girls to take up Computing? I think a lot can be done, and have done so myself, but I wonder how far a lot of the effort fails to get to the heart of the issue, which could be the curriculum itself, the way it is taught, or a combination of the two?