(Almost) Everything You Need To Know For OCR A Level Computer Science (version 1.0)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

The first iteration of my revision guide is finally here!

This revision guide (KEYWORD “revision”) is intended to provide you with (arguably) the absolute best preparation possible for your OCR A level Computer Science H046/H446 spec exams.

By no means does this book cover the specification completely (at least not this version) and this book should only be used for revision purposes. That means it probably isn’t the best idea to learn the course content through this book because it’s extremely concise and is only really meant for revision purposes, hence the term “revision guide”.

For those of you who don’t know, The Muslim CompSci (me) is not a teacher or an examiner – I’m just a student trying to do my best to create resources for OCR A level Computer Science that are of good quality, but more importantly, are for free. That’s why this revision guide, along with all the other resources on my blog are for free so please take full advantage of them.

Anyway, let’s actually start talking about this book now. The contents page has a fairly detailed list which maps to the OCR spec exactly to show which parts are covered. As aforementioned this version (v1.0) is missing a few things so I guess I should point them out now. Here’s a list of all the spec points not covered in this version:

• 1.2.3 (c) Writing and following algorithms. 
• 1.3.4 (a) HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 
• 1.4.1 (b) Represent positive integers in binary. 
• 1.4.1 (c) Use of sign and magnitude and two’s complement to represent negative numbers in binary. 
• 1.4.1 (d) Addition and subtraction of binary integers. 
• 1.4.1 (e) Represent positive integers in hexadecimal. 
• 1.4.1 (f) Convert positive integers between binary hexadecimal and denary. 
• 1.4.1 (g) Representation and normalisation of floating point numbers in binary. 
• 1.4.1 (h) Floating point arithmetic, positive and negative numbers, addition and subtraction. 
• 1.4.1 (i) Bitwise manipulation and masks: shifts, combining with AND, OR, and XOR. 
• 1.4.2 (c) How to create, traverse, add data to and remove data from the data structures mentioned above. 
• 1.4.3 (a) Define problems using Boolean logic. 
• 1.4.3 (b) Manipulate Boolean expressions, including the use of Karnaugh maps to simplify Boolean expressions. 
• 1.4.3 (c) Use the following rules to derive or simplify statements in Boolean algebra: De Morgan’s Laws, distribution, association, commutation, double negation. 
• 1.4.3 (d) Using logic gate diagrams and truth tables. 
• 1.4.3 (e) The logic associated with D type flip flops, half and full adders. 
• 1.5.2 The individual moral, social, ethical and cultural opportunities and risks of digital technology. 
• 2.1 Elements of computational thinking 
• 2.2.1 (f) Use of object oriented techniques. 
• 2.2.2 (a) Analysis and design of algorithms for a given situation. 
• The Programming Project 

Looking at this list, you may be thinking that this book is missing a lot but if I made a list of all the stuff that is covered, then the list would be like 3 times longer. Anyway, version 1.0 covers about 75% of the A level specification and version 2.0 will cover all of it InShaAllah. All the theoretical parts of the spec are fully covered here, it’s just a few technical/practical topics that aren’t.

Moving on to all the other pages after the contents, each section begins with the spec point that it’s addressing. In other words, the title of the section is the spec point that it’s covering. Each section or chapter should I say, has a different colour scheme so you can easily find the right chapter quickly. Speaking of colour schemes, the A level only parts of the spec are highlighted in dark red.

I guess I should also mention that this revision guide took basically a week or so to write and nearly summarises the entire spec in 25 odd pages (which is quite impressive if you consider all the other revision guides available for this course). I guess that’s all the info you need to know about the book itself.

In regard to version 2.0, I already have a fairly good idea of what I’m going to add to it so let me just give you a little taste of what’s to come InShaAllah:

• Cover the entire specification (duh) 
• Have brief chapter overviews to emphasise the importance of computer science to the real world because let’s face it, most people have no idea why they have to learn this stuff if they’re not going to use it in they’re life. 
• Each chapter will have a review exercise with questions from past papers to help you consolidate your learning. 
• For the mathematical parts of the spec i.e. Boolean algebra and binary, worked examples of questions (probably from past papers) will be provided to illustrate model solutions to common exam problems. 
• This last one is a bit ambitious but at the end of the book (along with an index and a glossary) there will be 2 examination style papers; one for each component. Now that I think about, I may not be able to implement all of this in the next version but I definitely plan to over the next few InShaAllah. 

Here's the link: The Ultimate Revision Guide (v1.0)

Hope this helps!