Hartismere School

Est. 1451. An outstanding coeducational secondary school & sixth form college and England's first academy

Home Login

A Level Computer Science

What is it all about?

A level Computer Science builds upon the knowledge and skills developed at GCSE by going into greater depth, particularly with the workings of the CPU, operating systems, web technologies and programming. We have had many successful students who have studied this without taking GCSE computer science, but it would be a steep learning curve.

What do we study?

The course is split into two units at AS (year 12) and three in year 13 for the full A level: 

1. Computer systems: What we learn about includes the workings of the CPU, how software is created and the different types of software, how data is stored and represented in computers, how data is transferred between computers and the impacts of technology.

2. Algorithms and programming: This is all about understanding computational thinking and programming. We do quite a bit of programming using C# to develop experience coding.

3. Programming project: In year 13, students have the opportunity to develop a piece of software of their choice for an end user. They will use an Agile methodology to design, implement and test the program. This is a substantial bit of work but allows students to massively develop their programming ability.

Why would it be useful?

Students have expressed how the problem solving they have developed in computer science has complimented work in other subjects. Even if not actively pursuing a career in the industry, knowledge of how computers operate can only help in the modern world. Every year we have students go on to study computer related subjects at university, degree apprenticeships or straight into employment. The range of careers in the computing industry is massive. There are industries within industries! You have software development, hardware development, database management, web development, cyber security, network management, and many more.

 

We follow the OCR specification

Taking A Level Computer Science

A Level CS: Algorithm Assembly Instructions

Toyota Virtual Plant Tour

How robots are taking over warehouse work

Coding Challenges for GCSE and A Level Computer Science

In this section...

C# Yellow Book

Online Little Man Computer - CPU simulator

Sorting Visualiser

C# Cook Books

Programming software

CPU Fetch-Decode-Execute Animation

GCSE Computer Science

I Belong: encouraging girls into computer science programme

Essential programming skills to learn

See also...

Programming

Binary addition 1

Tutor Time (Life Lessons)

Our curriculum

Week beginning 12 Feb 2024: 'Life Lessons'

Professional Services

Sport and PE

Labour Market Information (LMI)

Science & Innovation

Revision for computer science

Explore...

theoutdoorscompany Kit Order form

SEND Information Report

Examination Result Queries

The Parent Perspective - Careers Podcast

Hartismere Ofsted Report 2014

Careerometer

MegaProcessor - the largest CPU in the world

National Citizenship Service (NCS)

Careers Information for Pupils

Careers Information for Parents

New...

Parents Evening :: Year 12

Music Evenings 2025

Parents Evening :: Year 10

E-Safety

HERCULES THE MUSICAL- Years 7 & 8. London

Vacancies

WAR HORSE, Norwich Theatre Royal, Thursday 6th November 2025 Places available

Hartismere Family :: Policy Documents

Discover...

ICT Computer Science A Level CS Student Information A Levels A Level Food Repl.It Psychology French iMedia Science Music Hitchcock Homework Options Digital Test CIEAG Key Stage 3 C# Cook Book Hartismere Religious

Uh-oh - we were unable to load our website on your browser so we're showing you a plain HTML version.

We use many features found in modern browsers and regrettably yours seems incompatible.

However this legacy version contains (very, very nearly) all the same content. Each page is rendered on our server and doesn't rely on any browser features except the odd font. It doesn't even need Javascript or fancy CSS. It's like being in 1995!

Your browser is reporting itself to us as Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com). Please consider updating your browser to make the most of our website.

If you would like to try our proper website again - you can do so here...