[Year 12 SofDev] U3O2 - Programming skills

[Mark]

Hi Peter. Welcome to the club.
Sometimes the study design is not explicit about what needs to be taught
(which leads to many discussions in this forum, actually.)
For example, U3O2 key knowledge (KK) 9 refers to control structures, which
could encompass IF, WHILE/WEND etc.
The same KK includes instructions and functions, which could be argued to
include all of the math/arithmetic operators.

The SD course is meant to cover all of the basic principles of programming,
so it a topic seems to you to absolutely fundamental to understanding the
core skills of programming, you should teach it.

And be careful choosing your approved programming
language<http://www.vceit.com/p/00-SD-approvedlanguages.htm> -
VB6 is still kosher, by the way (but may not be for much longer).
An exception to this rule of thumb is that flowcharts and Nassi-Shneiderman
diagrams are NOT needed. Pseudocode is. See past
exams<http://www.vceit.com/#exams>for an idea of how VCAA interprets
pseudocode.

Another caveat: while kids do need to know records, random/sequential files
and data structures (1+2 dimension arrays), don't get distracted by
external database engines such as MySQL... this caused several people to
lose focus on core programming concepts in the previous study design.

And please feel free to keep asking questions... we all started off the
same way.

Cheers
Mark



On 10 April 2013 20:17, Langham, Peter P <langham.peter.p at edumail.vic.gov.au
> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I'm teaching Software Development for the first time and would appreciate
> some wisdom from those more experienced.
>
> In the study design, I can see that I need to cover data types, arrays,
> records and files.
>
> But I can't find anything about other skills, general mathematical
> calculations, If statements, While loops, For loops etc.
>
> Is there a list of key skills whilst we're programming?
>
> I don't want to miss anything that could be on an exam.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Peter Langham
> Narre Warren South P-12 College
>
-- 
--
Mark Kelly
mark AT vceit DOT com
http://vceit.com
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