Computer Science

Students looking to take Computer Science at A-level can choose from any of the follow tasks to prepare themselves for the content of the course. 

Transition to A-level Computer Science workbook 

The workbook below gives an insight into some of the topics that are covered at A-level. Download the workbook and delve into the course content. Please feel free to email either Miss Page or Mrs Nolan for the answers! 

 Learn a new programming language 

There are so many online courses for learning a new programming language. There are many different fields to explore in Computer Science and although not all career paths need programming skills,  knowing the basics of coding will be essential for building Computational Thinking skills. 

Websites that can help with coding: 

https://www.codecademy.com/ - Offers a wide variety of courses for free to introduce you to different languages. 

https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=coding - Offers course at a small price to teach you how to program in the most common languages. 

https://www.learnpython.org/ - Excellent free website to learn everything you need to program in Python. 

Write a project proposal 

For the project part of the course, you will be required to Analyse, Design, Develop and Evaluate a computational problem that you have chosen to solve. This could be a game, database system or even robotics. The guide below provides examples of the level of complexity needed for the project. To gain a head start, why not write a project proposal (no more than one page), which details what your project idea is and how you will complete the task. Please send your proposal to Miss Page or Mrs Nolan. 

Practice programming challenges 

The two files below are coding challenges set by OCR for both GCSE and A-level. If you want to brush up on your coding skills then attempt some of the GCSE challenges first before challenging yourself with the A-level  tasks. 

Thinking Procedurally  

One of the topics for the course is be able to identify procedures and to break down a problem in order to solve it. You will have explored the basis of this if you have studied GCSE Computer Science. If not, don't worry, the activity below should help you to understand how this is done.