Section 1 Components of a Computer

• The parts and operation of the CPU

• The factors that affect the performance of the CPU

• The different types of CPU (RISC and CISC)

• Input, Output and Storage devices

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Section 2 System software

• The function of the operating system (including scheduling algorithms)

• Different types of operating systems

• Applications (open/closed source, utility programs, off the shelf v bespoke)

• Translation software (Assemblers, bytecode, compilers and interpreters) and how it works (Lexical analysis)

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Section 3 Software development

• System analysis methods (waterfall, spiral, agile (sub forms of agile like RAD, XP)) and types of testing

• Writing and following algorithms (using trace tables) - spotting the obvious sorting ones etc.

• Paradigms (ways) of programming - Procedural, OOP (inheritance, polymorphism etc), Declarative, Functional

• Assembly language (Little man computing and the 11 commands) and methods of addressing memory

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Section 4 Exchanging Data

• Compression (lossy/lossless), encryption and hashing

• Relational databases (normalisation) and referential integrity

• SQL - you need to be able to write simple SQL code

• Transaction processing (ACID, record locking) and methods of data capture

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Section 5 Network and Web technologies

• Structure of the Internet (DNS, URLs, IP, topologies), circuit and packet switching and the TCP/IP stack

• Network security threats

• HTML, CSS, Javascript - you need to be able to read and write the code and know its purpose

• Client/Server, Peer to peer, server side processing, APIs and how PageRank works

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Section 6 Primitive data types, binary and hexadecimal

• ASCII and Unicode

• Binary arithmetic (underflow and overflow)

• Fixed and Floating point binary

• Bitwise manipulation and masks

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Section 7 Data structures

• Arrays, Tuples, 1d and 2d arrays

• Queues, Lists and Linked Lists

• Stacks, hashing and hash tables

• Graphs, Trees and their traversal (pre, post and inorder)

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Section 8 Boolean algebra

• Logic gates and truth tables (AND, OR, NOT and XOR)

• Simplifying Boolean expressions (De Morgan and the simple rules)

• Karnaugh maps

• Adders (full and half) and D-type flip-flops

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Section 9 Legal, moral, ethical and cultural issues

• Computer related legislation (Data Protection, Computer Misuse, Copyright Designs and Patents, RIPA)

• Ethical, moral and cultural issues

• Privacy and censorship

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Section 10 Computational thinking

• Abstraction, spotting reusability and the benefits of caching

• Decomposition, thinking logically and concurrently (parallel processing)

• Problem solving (enumeration, simulation, theoretical and heuristic approaches)

• Data mining, travelling salesman and A star routing

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Section 11 Programming techniques

• Constants, variables, rounding, exponents, string manipulation

• Iteration and looping

• Subroutines and recursion

• Object orientated programming (classes, instantiation, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism)

 

Section 12 Algorithms 

• Comparing algorithms using Big O Notation (Linear, polynomial, exponential, logarithmic, constant complexity)

• Searching algorithms (Linear, Binary)

• Sorting algorithms (Bubble, Insertion, Merge and Quick)

• Graph traversal (Depth first, Breadth first, Dijkstra, A star)

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Past Papers

On the course we are following the OCR GCE Computer Science course. This is a set of the past papers and the mark schemes for the course - I would advise completing 2 papers (and marking them) each week from January to the exam. If there is something that is unclear when you mark it - then bring it to me in class for a 1:1 overview.

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June 2022

AS Paper 1 (mark scheme) and AS Paper 2 (mark scheme)

A2 Paper 1 (mark scheme) and A2 Paper 2 (mark scheme)

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