The OCR J277 specification, mapped to Coding Pathway Worksheets

What the CPU does, the Von Neumann model, registers, and the fetch-execute cycle.

How clock speed, cache size and the number of cores change what a CPU can do.

Computers built into other devices: what they are, where they appear and why.

RAM, ROM and virtual memory, and why a computer needs each of them.

Optical, magnetic and solid state technologies, and how to choose between them.

Bits to petabytes, calculating file sizes, and converting between units.

How numbers, characters, images and sound become binary: conversions, addition, shifts, ASCII, pixels and samples.

Lossy and lossless compression, and when each one is the right call.

LANs, WANs, hardware, topologies, the internet, DNS, hosting and the cloud.

Connections, IP and MAC addressing, standards, common protocols and layering.

Malware, phishing, social engineering, brute force, denial of service, interception and SQL injection.

Penetration testing, anti-malware, firewalls, user access levels, passwords, encryption and physical security.

What an operating system does: interfaces, memory, multitasking, peripherals, users and files.

Encryption, defragmentation and data compression utilities, and why systems need them.

Impacts of digital technology on wider society, plus the legislation that applies: data protection, computer misuse, copyright and licensing.

Abstraction, decomposition and algorithmic thinking, and how to spot each one in a problem.

Inputs, processes and outputs, structure diagrams, pseudocode, flowcharts, trace tables, and finding and fixing errors.

Linear and binary search; bubble, insertion and merge sort, step by step.

Variables, constants, input and output, operators, sequence, selection and iteration.

Integers, reals, Booleans, characters and strings, and casting between them.

Strings, arrays, functions and procedures, file handling, records and SQL, and random numbers.

Anticipating misuse, authentication, input validation and writing maintainable code.

Types of testing, syntax and logic errors, and choosing test data that actually finds problems.

AND, OR and NOT, truth tables, and reading and drawing logic diagrams.

High- and low-level languages, and how compilers and interpreters differ.

The tools an IDE gives you: editors, error diagnostics, run-time environments and translators.