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Computer ScienceQ&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every Scotland Computer Science syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
Area 2: Computer Systems
- The structure of a computer: the processor (ALU, control unit and registers), the buses (data and address) used to read from and write to memory, and the difference between an interpreter and a compiler.3Q&A pairs
- Representing characters using ASCII, extended ASCII and Unicode, and the principle that program instructions and all real-world data are ultimately stored as binary.3Q&A pairs
- Representing positive and negative integers using two's complement, and representing real numbers using floating-point with a mantissa and exponent.3Q&A pairs
- The environmental impact of computer systems: their energy consumption, ways to reduce that impact, and the environmental considerations of intelligent systems.3Q&A pairs
Area 3: Database Design and Development
- Analysing a database problem and designing the data model: entity-relationship diagrams, entities and attributes, relationships and cardinality, the data dictionary, and primary, foreign and compound keys.3Q&A pairs
- Referential integrity and entity integrity between linked tables, and validation of data entered into a database (presence, restricted choice and field length checks).3Q&A pairs
- Changing the data in a relational database with SQL INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE on prepopulated linked tables, and the implications of these operations.3Q&A pairs
- Querying a relational database with SQL SELECT, including WHERE, joining multiple tables, ORDER BY, aliases, wildcards, computed values, aggregate functions and GROUP BY.2Q&A pairs
Area 1: Software Design and Development
- The analysis stage: identifying the purpose, scope, boundaries and functional requirements of a problem to produce a requirements specification.3Q&A pairs
- Computational constructs: assignment and arithmetic, selection with logical operators, fixed and conditional iteration, pre-defined functions, and sub-programs with parameter passing (by value and by reference) and variable scope.3Q&A pairs
- Data types and structures: variables of simple types, 1-D arrays, records, and parallel arrays or arrays of records, with string operations.3Q&A pairs
- Design notations used to describe a solution: structure diagrams, flowcharts and pseudocode, and the design of the user interface (wireframes).3Q&A pairs
- The iterative software development process (analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation and evaluation) and the difference between the traditional waterfall approach and agile methodologies.3Q&A pairs
- Standard algorithms: input validation, running total within a loop, traversing a 1-D array, linear search, counting occurrences, and finding the minimum or maximum.3Q&A pairs
- Testing with normal, extreme and exceptional test data; syntax, execution and logic errors; debugging techniques; and evaluating software for fitness for purpose, efficiency, robustness and readability.3Q&A pairs
- The course assignment: practical tasks worth 40 marks that apply the analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation skills to software and to either a database or a website.3Q&A pairs
Area 4: Web Design and Development
- Analysing a website's purpose and functional requirements, and designing its structure and interface using a site structure diagram, wireframes and a low-fidelity prototype.3Q&A pairs
- Styling a web page with CSS: element, class and id selectors; controlling appearance and positioning; internal, external and inline styles; and a horizontal navigation bar.3Q&A pairs
- Building a web page with HTML: the page-layout structural elements (header, nav, section, footer), links, images, lists and tables, and forms for user input.3Q&A pairs
- Adding interactivity with JavaScript: responding to events (such as onclick and onmouseover), writing functions, and changing page elements through the DOM (for example getElementById and innerHTML).2Q&A pairs
- Testing a website against its requirements (links, forms and scripts), checking usability and browser compatibility, and evaluating it for fitness for purpose.3Q&A pairs