Sir John Deane's Course Prospectus 2018 1 Sir John Deane's_Courses | Page 30

Computer Science
Course Breakdown
Course Summary
• Exam board is AQA
Paper Content Marks Duration Weighting
On-screen exam Programming on a Computer 100 2 hours
30 minutes 40%
Paper The Science Behind Computer 100 2 hours
30 minutes 40%
Coursework Making your own Program 75 NA 20%
Summary of Content
The A level course is divided into 14 chapters:
Chapters 1 – 4 Learning to program effectively
Programming paradigms; Data structures; Algorithms;
The Theory of Computation
Chapters 5 – 12 Foundations of Computer Science
Binary and Hexadecimal; Logic Gates and Boolean
Algebra; Computer Architecture; The Ethics of Computer
Science; Communication and Networking; Fundamentals
of Databases; Big Data; Functional Programming Theory.
• Make sure the program has the following logic gates:
AND, OR, NOT, NOR, NAND, XOR. If you have not
seen logic gates before then this website explains
the possible inputs and outputs of each: http://
www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Projects/CAL/digital-logic/
gatesfunc/#andgate
Purchase the “AQA A level Computer Science” textbook
by Hodder education (Bob Reeves), read the “number
systems (binary number system)” topic (page 189) and
complete the tasks on page 193.
Chapters 13 – 14 Planning and completing a
programing project
The systematic approach to problem solving; Creating
critical paths; Implementing large-scale projects.
Suggested Preparation for September
Download Visual Basic Community Edition (VB 2015)
onto your home computer (you will need to follow this
link https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/older-downloads/
and scroll down to the 2015 row, you will need to create
a developer account but this is free).
Attempt to create a program in Visual Basic which:
• Asks the user to enter two inputs (e.g. 1 or 0) and a
logic gate. The program will then output the answer
based on the two inputs and the logic gate
• For example, if the user entered “1” “0” and “OR”
this would perform the OR gate operation which
would output a “1”
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