ALEX LAMING, HEAD OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Our A-Level Students achieve A* grades in Computer Science whilst developing highly technical software solutions for their Non Exam Assessment coursework.

Abby S and Sophia M developed highly sophisticated programs for their A-Level Computer Science projects this year. Both students demonstrated substantial technical skill with a range of technologies whilst following a system life cycle project plan through analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation.

Abby’s Theme Park Planner

With her love of theme parks and roller coasters she set about creating a software tool that would allow a user to enter their preferences for theme park rides and then see recommendations for the best parks to visit and most suitable rides to try out. She then even found a way to get the program to work out your route around a given theme park to a specific ride location. Abby built her program using the Python programming language but had to master the use of GUI programming with tkinter to create an interactive user interface. Abby also had to deploy and connect to a MySQL database system to store large quantities of data about theme park rides. In addition to this she showed excellent knowledge of Object Oriented programming techniques, SQL queries and graph traversal algorithms to complete the solution. Abby made Vimeo videos of her tests to prove the solution worked as expected.

Sophia’s Decryption Tool to aid learning

Like Abby, Sophia wrote a very technical piece of software using the Python programming language and this involved a complex object oriented design approach to programming and the acquisition of a huge body of research about how a range of historical data encryption techniques operate. The program that she wrote can read in and analyse a large block of ciphertext ( normal text that has been encrypted) and then perform complex decryption techniques ( she produced algorithms for several different ones) to decrypt it back to its original form. Sophia developed a very successful tool for the Caesar Cipher, substitution cipher and the Vignere cipher. The interface was built by programming with tkinter and the algorithms developed were extremely mathematical and used complicated programming techniques such as recursion.

Both Abby and Sophia have progressed to Computer Science university degrees this year, at Northeastern (Boston) and St Andrews respectively.