The OCR H446 specification, mapped to Coding Pathway Worksheets

The fetch-decode-execute cycle, registers, buses, pipelining and the architectures a processor can be built on.

CISC and RISC, GPUs, multicore and parallel systems, and what each one is good at.

Choosing devices for a purpose, magnetic, flash and optical storage, RAM and ROM, and virtual storage.

What an operating system does: memory management, interrupts, scheduling, virtual machines, BIOS, drivers and types of system.

Utilities, open and closed source, translators, stages of compilation, and linkers and loaders.

The lifecycle methodologies, from waterfall to agile, plus writing, testing and maintaining a system.

Procedural, assembly and object-oriented programming, and the paradigms behind them.

Lossy and lossless compression, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, and what hashing is for.

Relational design, normalisation, keys, SQL, referential integrity and transaction processing.

Types of network, protocols and layering, hardware, the internet, DNS, packet switching and client-server models.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript, search engine indexing and PageRank, and server-side against client-side processing.

Primitive types, binary and hexadecimal, sign and magnitude and two's complement, floating point, shifts and character sets.

Arrays, records, lists, tuples, stacks, queues, trees, graphs and hash tables, and how each is used.

Logic gates and truth tables, simplifying expressions with De Morgan's laws, and half and full adders.

The Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse Act, copyright and designs legislation, and regulation of investigatory powers.

Computing in society: privacy, automated decision making, artificial intelligence, environmental impact and the pressure on the individual.

What abstraction is, what it removes, and why a model is more useful than the thing itself.

Inputs and outputs, preconditions, reusable components and caching.

Decomposition, ordering the sub-problems, and building a solution from its parts.

Finding the decision points in a problem and working out what each one depends on.

Spotting what can run at the same time, and judging whether concurrency actually pays.

Sequence, selection and iteration, subroutines and recursion, scope, IDEs, file handling and object-oriented code.

Recognising a problem as computable: features, thinking tools, and methods such as backtracking, heuristics and performance modelling.

Big O complexity, searching and sorting, path finding with Dijkstra and A*, and the standard algorithms for the structures in 1.4.2.