The 4th Creative Mathematical Sciences Communication (CMSC 2018) will be held 21–23 July 2018. It is hosted by The Learning Connexion (TLC) in Wellington, New Zealand. Please join scientists, researchers, artists of all sorts in developing new ways of communicating computational thinking to children and to the public. We need activities in specific art forms (like dance, graphic art, theatre, …), we need many more that we can try with children.

New Zealand and other education ministries (Australia, Lithuania, and others) are including computational thinking in their curricula. Now is the time to provide these ministries and teachers with activities in order to implement the computational thinking objectives. We would like a 2018 CMSC goal of producing ten more 
Computer Science Unplugged activities (www.csunplugged.org).

The 2018 CMSC is a great opportunity for this because we have ample lead time to discuss possible activities prior to meeting in New Zealand, and once at TLC we will have the artists of Jonathan and Alice’s Institute to help implement the ideas into an activity. Already Tim, Matt and Brett are working with teachers who will use  the activities.

The website for CMSC New Zealand will be up shortly. Please register.

Previous CMSC conferences are:

3rd)  CMSC2017 University of Luebeck, Germany                                    <http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/sonderseiten/cmsc/>

2nd)  CMSC2014 Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India <https://www.imsc.res.in/~cmsc2014/>

1st)  CMSC2013 Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia <http://www.cdu.edu.au/conference/csmaths/>

It is our pleasure to invite you to join us at the Second conference on Creative Mathematical Sciences Communication which will be held at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India from 9-12 December 2014.

We hope that you will participate and share your valuable insights and experiences. Information on the conference can be found at: http://www.imsc.res.in/~cmsc2014/index.html

This is a second in a conference series that explores new ways of helping students achieve 21st Century competencies in mathematics and computer science, which includes math activities across the curriculum.

The first conference in the series, held in Charles Darwin University, Northern Territories, Australia, from August 2 to 8, 2013, saw a unique interaction between artists (theatre, dance, graphic arts) and mathematicians / math educators.

The main theme of the conference is popularizing the rich mathematics underlying computer science, a new kind of mathematics much of the school / college education community is largely untouched by. And yet, this has the potential to unlock a great amount of creativity, currently stifled by the calculus oriented math curricula.

We do NOT wish to discuss how to make math easy, how to teach topic X or Y in the syllabus easily, but to attract children to open problems, to dare reach for gold. We believe that combinatorics and computer science mathematics offer extensive opportunities in this regard.

Importantly, the conference aims to engage research mathematical scientists in outreach and communication. Bringing together researchers, educators and communicators committed to bringing exploration and discovery into classrooms and among the educated public, the conference hopes to explore new ways of thinking initiated by Computer Science Unplugged and other similar efforts in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, travel funding is rather limited, but we will be happy to provide local hospitality. We look forward to your acceptance and participation in CMSC 2014.

Best regards, Fran and jam

— Frances.Rosamond@cdu.edu.au, Charles Darwin University, Darwin

— jam@res.imsc.in    R. Ramanujam, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

Organizers, CMSC 2014