Two weeks today: Recursion 2018

This year’s Midlands Midsummer Mugshow taking place in winter!

The Recursion Computer Science Fair will be taking place two weeks from today, on Saturday, 17th February, having moved from the early July date of the last few years. The Fair offers a fun-packed day for anyone interested in computing in any form, with a heavy focus on education.

Organised by Richard Barfoot, Head of Computing at the King Edward IV School in Stratford-upon-Avon, the event attracts exhibitors from a range of fields and platforms, and since 2015 has effectively become the home of the Midlands Midsummer Mugshow, the RISC OS show organised by the Midlands User Group.

Being multi-platform, the event is much bigger than the usual RISC OS shows, with visitor numbers in excess of 500, but this year’s RISC OS exhibitors are expected to include:

• AMCOG Games
  Tony Bartram will have his ever increasing range of games to play and purchase, as well as the AMCOG Development Kit – designed to make it easier to write games in BBC BASIC – and if visitors ask him nicely, he may be willing to show off the latest games he has in development.
• Ident Computer
  Tom Williamson will be showing off the new Ident WinCE, as well as the Micro One, and will likely have the latest development version of Nanogangs for visitors to play, a game Tom is developing for both RISC OS and the BBC Micro.
• The Midlands User Group
  The local user group will  have a variety of exhibits, including a Stirling Engine, some programming tasks in a variety of languages for visitors to try their hand at, and there may even be a competition to win a Raspberry Pi Zero, with a RISC OS card to use with it.
• RISC OS Open Ltd
  The company that looks after the operating system itself will be represented by Rob Sprowson, who will be talking about the educational benefits of RISC OS to visitors, and expects to have the robot arm usually seen on ROOL’s stands at other shows.
• The RISC OS User Group of London
  Bryan Hogan will have computers set up running a number of pieces of software, including games such as Zarch and Elite, and may also be running the Jan Vibe graphics programs.
• Soft Rock Software
  The Soft Rock Software stand will feature a rolling demo of Jan Vibe’s graphics programs, courtesy of Richard Ashbery who has updated them to run on the Raspberry Pi. There will also be games to play on another computer and, subject to the cards arriving on time from RISC OS Open, it may be possible to purchase a RISC OS Pi card with the games pre-installed and ready to run.

The show – which is completely free to attend – will be open to the pubic from 11:00am, and will take place at: