Computer Science

Advanced Higher Computing Science is assessed by an SQA exam and a large individual project in which students plan, build, test and evaluate a substantial piece of software or an information system of their own design.

Programming moves into object-oriented design, data structures such as stacks, queues and linked lists, recursion, sorting and searching algorithms with an introduction to complexity, and formal design notation. Students also cover advanced database design, SQL, and web development with server-side scripting in many centres.

The project is worth a large share of the award and is where students most need structure: choosing a scope that is ambitious but finishable, keeping proper documentation, and testing methodically rather than at the end.