The computing Higher proved to be bang up-to-date this year with a question on holographic storage in the multimedia section of the paper.
At the research and development stage, holographic storage is described by Mark Tennant, a computing teacher at Dunbar Grammar, in East Lothian, as “a next generation DVD which will allow you to store hundreds of times more information”.
“For the Higher, pupils have to know about current developments,” said Mr Tennant. “It was a good question that was relevant and up-to-date.”
Overall, he felt the Higher exam was “exceptionally fair”, and picked out Question 14 as a rigorous test of pupils’ networking knowledge.
Mr Tennant’s pupils studied the artificial intelligence optional unit. A question about the declarative programming languages such as Prolog “might have tripped some students up”, but was still a “good question”, he said.
