<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2180" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial size=2>Today I started
looking more closely at the revised study design to plan for next year. One of
the things that struck me is that it is difficult to know what the minimum
content requirements are in a number of areas. For example-data structures. I
don't think it specifically mentions any particular data structure. U4O1 key
knowledge includes "methods of organising files....serial, sequential, random"
which implies the need to cover records. Arrays are not specifically referred to
and while, it would be pretty dumb to omit them, are 1-dim arrays enough, or
might exams expect ability to work with multi-dim arrays? What about sets,
pointers....</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial size=2>Another KK point
--> 'Forms and uses of data structures to organise and manipulate data'.
Which data structures?? What types of uses?? - all the oldies like sorting,
linked lists, queues, binary searches etc are possible
here.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial size=2>Now I know we have
the flexibility to cover as much of this as we want to for the kids who are
really into it, particularly for those who already have a reasonable programming
foundation as they enter the course. But what I don't know is what the minimum
requirement is. This becomes more important when most of your group have
little to no programming experience.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial size=2>What do you think
about this?</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=457302302-25102006><FONT face=Arial
size=2>Frank</FONT></SPAN></DIV></BODY></HTML>