I hope your revision and exams are going well.  Seven more sleeps till your Computing exam, I know a few of you will have other exams between now and then but this post is only focused on Computing. I’m not here today to get you wound up or to cause you any more stress, but this post, is to focus your attention on what you should be doing between now and then.

Here is what I would do with a week to go.

1. I wouldn’t study outside – its hot and full of distractions
2. I would start at 9 and do the following
   1. Past Paper
   2. Break
   3. Marking Past Paper
   4. Break down wrong answers into core and non core (using the list below – core is likely to come up the exam)
   5. Revise core
   6. Lunch
   7. Revise core
   8. Break (its about 2pm if the above tasks took you 2hr for the paper and 30 mins a task)
   9. Revise non core answers
   10. Look over the topics from the units by picking a half dozen topics each day.
3. Download this document. and use this as the basis for some questions on the topics I found hard, as well as, using it to aid revision of the topics in the units (List of Topics at bottom)
4. Use the blog, Scholar and other school’s notes to learn the core information I am not sure about.
5. I would learn the two images below and be able to describe and compare each of the aditdem elements with each other – E.g. what is the difference between Procedural and Event Driven Languages?
6. I would make sure that I can describe two differences of the attached.
7. I would look over and memorise the standard algorithms
8. I would buy a £1 calculator that does binary and learn how to use it.
9. If I was tired, I would take a break and I would cut down on caffeine.
10. I would give my mobile/tablet/games console to my parents when I was studying and get it back at breaks (when I was your age this was not an option  )

The above is not a roadmap to success! However, it might help get you the marks you need to change a grade.

Good luck in the exam! Remember ask questions here or to my email account, I will be checking them over the coming week and will try and get a response out ASAP. If you are finding it too warm to study, the class room has air con and I’m sure I could squeeze you in at a desk.

Core – likely to come up in the exam

Computer Systems

Software Development

• by value and by reference
• local and global variables
• concatenation and substrings
• design notations
• Evaluation – robustness, reliability, portability, efficiency and maintainability
• iterative
• macros
• maintenance
• module library
• one-dimensional arrays
• personnel
• procedural, declarative and event-driven
• real, integer and boolean variables
• Scope
• scripting languages
• software specification
• stages
• standard algorithms

Multimedia

• Authoring software
• Bluetooth
• CLUT
• codec and container file
• dithering
• MIDI
• MPEG
• PCM, ADPCM
• RAW, RIFF
• RLE, LZW
• Sound file size
• vector graphics
• Video file size
• anti-aliasing
• re-sampling

Unit / Topic