Computing Plus

One of the Year 9 Option Choices that is started in Year 10. In Year 10 students will finish off their IT GCSE which they will have started in Year 9. In this, for the controlled assessment, pupils must make a working system like in Year 9, but must this time present it to a real business that has not yet immersed itself in the world of IT There will then be a test probably some time around Easter. Towards the end of Year 10 and in Year 11, students will start their A-Level in Computing by completing the AS section. First they must learn for a test in January in Year 11. For this test they will need to know about the insides of a computer, how it works, about logic gates, how the internet works (including a small bit of HTML, most of it being cascading stylesheets A.K.A. CSS), different generations of programming languages and lots of acronyms. Seriously, you'd have to be autistic to remember them all: RAM; CPU; CIR; CD ROM; DVD ROM; VDU; CSS; HTML; HTTP; FTP; DNS; etc. After this test there will be another at the end of the year which will be done on a computer. Basically, it is a program someone has writen in Pascal and pupils are supposed to correct it and make improvements, so that it is shorten maybe so that it runs faster, semicolons may be missed out, a variable may need to be defined and things may be slightly out of position or in the wrong order. So from the January exam onwards most of the cirriculum will be learning Pascal.