Computer Studies / Computing

Course summary

Computer Science is an exciting subject, which will allow students to apply their academic skills practically, by writing computer programs to solve problems. Students who can think logically, are creative, and enjoy practical work are likely to enjoy the subject. It can lead to a range of interesting jobs, in a field in which much innovation and research is currently taking place. Students will start by gaining further experience in procedural-oriented programming but developing programs that have a graphical user interface instead of a command line one and learn about other aspects of programming such as communicating with database servers using SQL. They will then progress to object-oriented programming in C# and finally, they get a taste of the functional programming paradigm using Haskell and assembly language programming using the ARM instruction set. Students will also study the fundamentals of computing devices, the logic gate circuits that enable computing devices to perform operations, the structure and role of the processor, the low-level language of the machine, and how it is used to program the hardware directly. Topics such as networking and the storage and processing of the vast amounts of data that are now generated all the time (Big Data) are also covered.