St Mary's Catholic College, Wallasey

St Mary's Catholic College
A Voluntary Aided Academy

Key Stage 5 Computer Science

The OCR GCE in Computer Science will above all else be relevant to the modern and changing world of Computing. Computer Science is a practical subject where students can apply the academic principles learnt in the classroom to real world systems. It is an intensely creative subject that combines invention and excitement and can look at the natural world through a digital prism. Students will develop skills in computational thinking, problem solving, system design and understanding the power and limits of human and machine intelligence.

The A-Level is divided into 3 units:

Unit 1: Computer Systems

This component will introduce students to the internal workings of the Central Processing Unit (CPU), the exchange of data and will also look at software development, data types and legal and ethical issues. It is expected that students will draw on this underpinning content when studying computational thinking, developing programming techniques and devising their own programming approach in the Programming project component. Students will be expected to apply the criteria below in different contexts including current and future uses of the technologies.

Topics Studied:

40% of GCSE

140 marks

2 hour and 30 minutes

Written paper

Unit 2: Algorithms and Programming

This component will incorporate and build on the knowledge and understanding gained in the Computer systems component. In addition, students should understand what is meant by computational thinking the benefits of applying computational thinking to solving a wide variety of problems, the principles of solving problems by computational methods, be able to use algorithms to describe problems and be able to analyse a problem by identifying its component parts.

Topics Studied:

40% of GCSE

140 marks

2 hour and 30 minutes

Written paper

Unit 3: Programming Project

Students will be expected to analyse, design, develop, test, evaluate and document a program written in a suitable programming language. The underlying approach to the project is to apply the principles of computational thinking to a practical coding problem. Students are expected to apply appropriate principles from an agile development approach to the project development. While the project assessment criteria are organised into specific categories, it is anticipated the final report will document the agile development process and elements for each of the assessment categories will appear throughout the report.

Topics Studied:

20% of GCSE

140 marks

Non-Exam Assessment (NEA)

Specification

http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/170844-specification-accredited-a-level-gce-computer-science-h446.pdf