A Level Computer Science

A Level Computer Science

Easter Revision Course Dates 2024

• Week 1: Monday 25 March – Friday 29 March
• Week 2: Monday 1 April – Friday 5 April
• Week 3: Monday 8 April – Friday 12 April

Boards

AQA

Length of Course

Five full days, 40 hours total.

Times

9.00am to 12.30pm or 1.00pm to 4.30pm daily.

The purpose of the course is to provide students with a concise revision of the exam theory required to meet the demands of the A level qualification, together with advice on examination technique specific to the AQA A level examinations.

The time allocated to a unit for the content will involve revision of key points of each topic within that unit, with illustrations of how that subject matter may be examined in the unit examination. The half day allocated for examination technique and practice will be used to look at identifying the requirements of questions and applying the theory learned to the questions, to maximise marks.

Topic 1 (AS) – Fundamentals of Programming:
Data types; Programming structures; Arithmetic; Relational & Boolean operations; Constants and variables; Stringhandling; Random numbers; Exception handling and Subroutines. Fundamentals of Data Structures: Data structures; Arrays; Fields, records and files.

Topic 2 (AS) – Theory of computation:
Problem Solving; Following and writing algorithms; Abstraction & Decomposition; Composition; Automation and Finite State Machines.

Topic 3 (AS) – Fundamentals of Data Representation:
Numbers – natural, integer, rational, irrational, real, ordinal, counting and measuring; Number Bases; Units of information – bits, bytes & units; Binary Number System – unsigned, unsigned arithmetic, two’s complement, fractions; Information coding systems – character forms, ASCII, Unicode, Error checking; Representing images, sound and other data. Fundamentals of Communication and Networking: Communication methods and basics; Networking topologies and Wireless networking.

Topic 4 (AS) – Fundamentals of Computer Systems:
Hardware and software; Classification of software; System software; Role of an operating system; Classification of programming languages; Types of program translator; Logic Gates and Boolean Algebra.

Topic 5 (AS) – Fundamentals of Computer Organisation and Architecture:
Internal hardware components; Stored program concept; Structure and role of processor and its components; Fetch-Execute cycle and the role of registers; Processor instruction set and addressing modes; Machine code / Assembly language and External hardware devices.

Topic 6 (2nd Year) – Fundamentals of Computer Organisation and Architecture:
Internal hardware components; Stored program concept; Structure and role of processor and its components; Fetch-Execute cycle and the role of registers; Processor instruction set and addressing modes; Machine code / Assembly language and External hardware devices.

Topic 7 (2nd Year) – Fundamentals of Communication and Networking:
Communication methods and basics; Networking topologies & Wireless networking and The Internet and TCP/IP.

Topic 8 (2nd Year) – Fundamentals of Databases:
Conceptual data models and entity relationship modelling; Relational databases and Structured Query Language (SQL).

Topic 9 (2nd Year) – Big Data:
Big Data. Fundamentals of Data Structures: Data structures; Arrays; Fields, records and files; Abstract data types/structures; Queues, Stacks, Graphs, Trees, Hash tables, Dictionaries and Vectors. Fundamentals of Algorithms: Graph-traversal; Tree- traversal; Reverse polish and Searching, sorting & optimisation algorithms.

Topic 10 (2nd Year) – Fundamentals of Functional Programming:
Functional programming paradigm; Writing functional programs and Lists in functional programming.