**UPDATE - 95% of my 56 students this year achieved grades 9-4. The majority of them said that these knowledge organisers were there main revision source along with answer exam style questions to see how to apply the knowledge to a scenario-type question. The knowledge is compact as possible whilst still giving enough information to be able to answer most Paper 2 exam questions. Please do leave feedback, always happy to make any changes if needed. Thanks Rachel

This grade calculator can be used to forecast what marks a student needs to achieve in the AQA Computer Science exams, if they know (or estimate) their NEA mark. You need to put an NEA mark out of 75 in the first yellow box and then a possible mark out of 100 in the second yellow box. This could be a mock exam result to help clarify where they are at right now and how many marks they need to achieve higher grades. It’s pretty simple to use and really powerful for the students to actually see what marks they need personally to achieve the grade they need. The current set up shows that a student who achieved 40 in the NEA and aiming for about 60 in one exam, would need to achieve 55 in the other exam to get a B grade overall. I hope you find this useful. Please note this is using 2019 grade boundaries and therefore can not be guaranteed as accurate but it has certainly helped my students visualise what they need to be getting in the exams. This can now be used to help judge and justify Centre Assessed Grades

Updated since review pointed out small change required - guidance that was mentioned has now been added I’ve written this guide to help staff and students at my school during lockdown - It covers everything important that you need to know when using Google Classrooms in a simple step-by-step guide with loads of screenshots to help. It starts with How to create your classroom and invite other teachers and students, shows you how to assign work (ensuring it is in a format that it needs to be) and how to check work and give feedback. It also shows what the student experience is like when using Google Classroom - and how they receive the notifications and how they get into the assignments and Hand in work (including how to upload photos of work to an assignment). It is 33 pages long. I hope you find this useful. I know the teachers in my school have found it invaluable.

I have created this quick grade calculator to help predict grades a little more accurately. This uses the 2019 grade boundaries and raw marks from Paper 1, Paper 2 and NEA. I have used my most recent mock exams for the Paper 1 and Paper 2 marks. I have then added a table that calculates 5% added to the exam paper raw marks, and another table with 10% (students always do slightly better in their final exams compared to their mocks and you may see a pattern from past year groups between 5 and 10% increase). Both tables have a cell that calculates how many marks would be needed to get up to the next grade (ie if, with the 5% added, the student is on a C grade - how many more marks would they need to get for the B grade). Of course, due to covid the grade boundaries are very likely to come down slightly but I have found the “how many more marks” has been really helpful to see if I think the student has a chance for that next grade up… usually you can see if it is really unlikely (I don’t think the grade boundaries are going to come down substantially). I hope this helps with predictions, but also to help discuss what they need to be working toward on their individual papers.

I’ve taken the maths quiz project from OCR in 2015 and used the new J276 programming project template to create a model write up for the students to see best practice. This shows success criteria, flow chart, pseudocode, testing during development, final testing (including an example of validating the code for one of the test sections) and evaluation. Please note the final testing table is not fully completed as it was to model to the students how to do it. The write up is for the first task only (as an exemplar) but all the python tasks needed for this project are included. I worked with my year 10 students (who have completed my python programming booklets in year 9 - also on TES) to learn some extra programming techniques through the maths quiz tasks. They have really enjoyed the lessons and learned a lot. They will be completing the programming project a little later in year 10. I also used these preparation tasks with my year 11s before getting them started on the J276 programming project. I was unable to upload python files, I have copied them and pasted them into a word document, I then copied and pasted them back to python to test and it seems to pick up the formatting - so it should be a paste, copy and go… This has been such a good prep for my students to refresh their programming skills for the project. We are completing Task 2, of the current J276 programming project tasks, which works really nicely with this unit of work.

Newly updated for the J277 Specification. I have been using similar knowledge organisers with my GCSE computer science students for a number of years and the students really work well with them. We have had really high success rates, with Progress being in the top 5 - 1% nationally in the three years before Covid (2019 being in the top 1%). We are a big comprehensive school, not a private school, with good sized classes of between 20 and 27 students. I use these knowledge organisers with the students alongside exam style questions. The students learn the knowledge from the KO, but then we use the KO when answering questions so that the students are thinking of how to put the knowledge into context of the question. They can then see that the same knowledge can be applied to many differently worded questions.

Although there only seemed to be small changes between J276 and J277 - they seemed to take a huge amount of time to edit the knowledge organisers. These have been used in my revision lessons in the past and have really worked well. Students who gained 8s and 9s in the final exams (pre-covid) have told me that they revised mainly from the knowledge organisers. All the knowledge for the Paper 2 exams are in these condensed, concise sheets. Rather than overwhelming my students with huge booklets and swamps of paper, I give them these at the end of the year and exam papers to work through together. It works - tried and tested!

This workbook is to be used after the Workbook 1 - Sequence. Workbook 1 covers everything for a very first time python coder from outputting to screen for the first time, to variables, constants, data types and string concatenation. This workbook will then introduce selection - including comparison operators, if statements, string methods such as .upper() and test tables. It is all to prepare the student for the programming project. I cover this workbook with my year 9 students (as teach-led lessons) and many of them feel comfortable with basic coding in python using the workbooks. This is not a differentiated activity.

The fourth workbook in the series - this introduces the count controlled loop (for loop) with explanation, activities and some definitions. It includes the range function and also introduces arguments and parameters (but not in a lot of detail). I use this with my year 9 students, in teacher-led lessons to prepare them for the GCSE in Computer Science.

Following on from python workbooks 1 and 2 - this workbook introduces the students to iteration, the condition controlled loop (while). It also introduces augmented assignment operators, dry runs and trace tables, infinite loops and importing some useful modules (namely random and time). I use them with my year 9 students in teacher led sessions and they work really well through them (often just electronic versions).

Over the last few years I have been revising this workbook to make it more succinct and knowledge-based. It has terminology, models and activities for the student to learn the basics of python. The workbooks are quite wordy and need to be read fully - this is not a differentiated resource - it is for a student to prepare for the GCSE in Computer Science. This is the first workbook of four (2 selection, 3 while and 4 for loops), but all of them incorporate lots of other knowledge and understanding with regard to programming in python such as string concatenation, type casting, testing and so on. My year 9 students work through these workbooks (teacher-led) so that by the time they join me in GCSE Computer Science, I hope that they have a solid enough foundation to “hit the ground running”. If a student comes to me with no programming knowledge or still feeling worried, they get the booklets either over the summer, or in September and I offer after school sessions for them to get up to speed. I’ve really noticed how much it has helped my GCSE course - I used to cover the workbooks in year 10 and it just seemed like such a waste of time. They can do it in year 9 and they enjoy it. Some students need extra challenges and some students may not be able to do all of the booklets, but they have a go and are not usually the students who are opting to take GCSE Computer Science.

This resource has a presentation to talk through why we use arrays, the difference between 1D and 2D arrays and the pseudocode and python syntax for both. There are numerous activities throughout where you can model the python on the board for the students to then try and then a final tasks PowerPoint that brings everything that has been taught together. All of the python has been written - all you need to do is copy and paste it into the python editor (not the shell). Each PowerPoint slide in 01b, 02 and 03b is a new program that can be copied as is and pasted into python. I have recently completed this unit of work with my year 10 students and they really enjoyed it, even lower ability programmers were able to do the majority of the coding. Not all of the codes in this unit are needed for the exam, but the students will need to know how to use a for loop through a 1D array and a nested for loop in a 2D array to get to individual elements in the arrays. I have seen lots of example exam questions that either ask them to write an algorithm to do this or to read the algorithm, so the more practice with this, the better. It also really prepares them for the programming project.

This spreadsheet allows the user to enter coursework grades (individual strands of Lesson Objectives) and mock exam marks (if you have them) to allow you to start to calculate or estimate an overall grade for the students. This is especially helpful now in terms of Centre Assessed Grades. It will help you to judge and justify grades for individual students looking at mock exam marks, completed and moderated coursework marks and allows for teacher judgement on incomplete coursework units. This has not been approved my OCR, it is purely a tool that I have created for me and colleagues in my school. I have had extremely good feedback from colleagues teaching the course but also SLT who can see how useful it is for progress data but most importantly for Centre Assessed Grades for the current year 11s now. I have written a document to help explain how to use it and there are two example students in the workbook to show how it works. I would suggest having a separate workbook for each class as there is space for up to 29 students in this workbook.

This spreadsheet allows the user to enter coursework grades (individual strands of Lesson Objectives) and mock exam marks (if you have them) to allow you to start to calculate or estimate an overall grade for the students. This is especially helpful now in terms of Centre Assessed Grades. It will help you to judge and justify grades for individual students looking at mock exam marks, completed and moderated coursework marks and allows for teacher judgement on incomplete coursework units. This has not been approved my OCR, it is purely a tool that I have created for me and colleagues in my school. I have had extremely good feedback from colleagues teaching the course but also SLT who can see how useful it is for progress data but most importantly for Centre Assessed Grades for the current year 11s now. I have written a document to help explain how to use it and there are two example students in the workbook to show how it works. I would suggest having a separate workbook for each class as there is space for up to 29 students in this workbook.