AS / A Level Computer Science

Candidates should be able to:

Show understanding of binary magnitudes and the difference between binary prefixes and decimal prefixes

Notes and guidance

Understand the difference between and use:

Candidates should be able to:

Show understanding of different number systems

Notes and guidance

Use the binary, denary, hexadecimal number bases and Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) and one’s and two’s complement representation for binary numbers

Convert an integer value from one number base/ representation to another

Candidates should be able to:

Perform binary addition and subtraction

Notes and guidance

Using positive and negative binary integers

Show understanding of how overflow can occur

Candidates should be able to:

Describe practical applications where Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) and Hexadecimal are used

Notes and guidance

N/A

Candidates should be able to:

Show understanding of and be able to represent character data in its internal binary form, depending on the character set used

Notes and guidance

Students are expected to be familiar with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), extended ASCII and Unicode.

Students will not be expected to memorise any particular character codes