St Mary's Catholic College, Wallasey

St Mary's Catholic College
A Voluntary Aided Academy

Key Stage 4 Computer Science

Computer Science students at St Mary’s will follow the OCR course at GCSE. This is a liner course, made up of 3 units.

Unit 1 - Computer systems

This component will introduce students to the Central Processing Unit (CPU), computer memory and storage, wired and wireless networks, network topologies, system security and system software. It is expected that students will become familiar with the impact of Computer Science in a global context through the study of the ethical, legal, cultural and environmental concerns associated with Computer Science. Students will draw on this underpinning content when completing the Programming Project component.

Topics studied:

40% of GCSE

80 marks

1 hour and 30 minutes

Written paper

Unit 2 - Computational thinking, algorithms and programming

This component incorporates and builds on the knowledge and understanding gained in unit 1, encouraging students to apply this knowledge and understanding using computational thinking. Students will be introduced to algorithms and programming, learning about programming techniques, how to produce robust programs, computational logic, translators and facilities of computing languages and data representation. Students will become familiar with computing related mathematics. Students will draw on this underpinning content when completing the Programming Project component.

Topics studied:

40% of GCSE

80 marks

1 hour and 30 minutes

Written paper

Unit 3 - Programming project

Students will need to create suitable algorithms which will provide a solution to the problems identified in the task which is set by the board at the start of year 11. Students will then code their solutions in a suitable programming language. The solutions must be tested at each stage to ensure they solve the stated problem and students must use a suitable test plan with appropriate test data. The code must be suitably annotated to describe the process. Test results should be annotated to show how these relate to the code, the test plan and the original problem. Students will need to provide an evaluation of their solution based on the test evidence.

Topics included in project:

20% of GCSE

40 marks

Totalling 20 hours

Non-Exam Assessment (NEA)

Specification
http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/225975-specification-accredited-gcse-computer-science-j276.pdf