_gcx's GCSE Journey :D

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Chemistry - Almost done my Chemistry controlled assessment, and I'm currently sitting on 4100 words, so a bit excessive :P That's the result of being scare of losing marks for being too vague! The only thing I've got left is to evaluate my method, ie. identifying strengths and weaknesses in the method. I have quite a good feeling about it, although I'm unsure whether it's deceiving or not. My teacher said that we were going to do a C2 recap test, although we haven't really started C3, except from a bit about ethanol production, so I have started my notes on it. I will try to keep all of the modules at neutral priority, for now. In terms of what I've covered, I've done the first two topics, which are Atomic Structure, which includes the basic "GCSE" structure of an atom, the periodic table, isotopes and relative atomic mass, and Ionic Compounds, which includes the general structure of ionic compounds, solubility rules, barium meals, insoluble salts, and spectroscopy. Tomorow I will continue with Topic 3, and I'll see how far I get from there!

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English - Looked a bit into War Photographer in class, mainly context and background information. We also finished off analysing "Charge Of The Light Brigade".

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Chemistry - Long story short, I've now completely finished by C2 revision notes. I did topics 3 through 6, and I think I did an ok job of making the notes. I started with covalent compounds, which included simple covalents and giant covalents, and their properties; miscible liquids and immiscible liquids, and how to separate them and chromotography. The 4th topic, was Groups in the Periodic Table, which included alkali metals, halogens, displacement reactions and noble gasses. The 5th topic was Chemical Reactions, which included endothermic/exothermic reactions, energy profile graphs and collision theory. Finally, was Quantitive Chemistry, which is a fairly straightforward topic, at least in my eyes, which included things like yield, empirical formula, and waste products of chemical reactions within industry. If anyone's wondering, I'm using CGP's Edexcel revision guides. CGP is quite good at explanations, and their revision guides are pretty complete in content, although I hear that might be different to the revision guide for AQA's course.

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Computer Science - I know this isn't strictly work, but I've been looking at several of the ProjectEuler problems, just to practice a bit of Python, to get back into it

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Maths - Just a few questions worth of practice, not much. The work on ProjectEuler might count as Maths revision, too! P

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Biology - To be honest, I've been putting off B2 for far too long. It was one of my stronger modules, so it hasn't been a priority. However, now that I've started it, I've realised how much content there actually is. I started topic 1, thinking that it wouldn't take too long, but it ended up taking an hour to an hour and a half, so 6 pages of notes already! xD My C2 notes only came to 12 pages! D: The first topic was Genes and Enzymes, seemingly one of my weaker topics. It involves the structure of cells, mitosis and meiosis, DNA, protein synthesis, enzymes, GM, cloning, etc. I think I've got it in sufficient detail, which is great! I'm going to be working on B2 this week, with some B3 and maybe P3. I should get through B2/B1 relatively quickly, seeing how I rocketed through C1/C2!

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Physics - I started my controlled assessment, and I feel pretty confident, as it's on a nice topic

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Biology - Continued my notes on B2. As topic 2 is quite long, I've decided to do topic 3 first, and then come back. Plus, topic 2 is pretty tedious :P The topic is "Organ Systems", and I started my notes of with notes on fossils, the pentadactyl limb, red and white blood cells and the circulatory system. It is a pretty good topic, and now I feel quite confident with those topics. Not much, but I made decent progress considering how I feel atm We start the Biology CA after we finished topic 3 of B3, we've just done topic 2, and I'm hoping that we get a nice topic that's somewhat easy to write about. Luckily, the Physics and Chemistry ones have been quite good in that regard

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Computer Science - Went through more ProjectEuler problems. I find PE allows me to improve both my programming skills, and my mathematical/logical reasoning skills, making it quite useful to build skills for Maths in general, at both GCSE and A-level.

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Biology - I've finished off the third topic of B2, meaning that I only have the second, boring, topic to go. After that, I'm probably going to start B1, or start finalising my P1/P2. I might even just get ahead on B3/C3/P3, who knows :P The rest of the topic included elements of the digestive system, the use of enzymes within the digestive system and probiotics/prebiotics. I'm aiming to finish topic 2 within the coming nights, and thus B2!

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Computer Science - More ProjectEuler!

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Biology - Almost finished, I have a tiny little section of Topic 2 to go. I would have finished the entire module, but I was cut slightly short about some Maths homework that I had forgotten about. I completed notes on respiration, the circulatory system, photosynthesis, movement of water and minerals within a plant, and methods for studying the distribution of organisms. I should be done with B2 pretty shortly, from which point I'll start Topic 1 of B1, which should be quite quick since B1 is one of the easiest modules imo.

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Computer Science - Got through quite a few PE problems, again! It's quite addicting actually :P

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Biology - I was going to start B1, but I forgot about that B3 question pack, and I thought it would make better revision, so I went through it. I did pretty well, overall, but I dropped 1 or 2 marks on a 6 marker, because I mis-interpreted the question. I think it was pretty solid revision, so that's great, and I regard that as progress. Tomorrow I'll likely, actually start on B1.

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French - I have to learn a French paragraph for Monday, and I haven't been able to learn it for the past few days, but I think I should be fine to learn it over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It's essentially a mock writing.

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Chemistry - My teacher said that we'll be recapping C1/C2 topics in class, and doing tests on each topic, so I'll be sure to look over my Chemistry notes over the week-end.

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Biology - Started B1 with the variations topic. It starts off with classification, which is a fairly easy and straightforward topic, definitely the easiest science topic overall! It also includes stuff like natural selection, speciation, and an introduction to genetics with things like Punnett squares, and genetic disorders such as Cystic fibrosis.

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Computer Science - Done some more ProjectEuler stuff, and found a way to do Fibonacci sequences efficiently using dictionaries, in Python. Now I just hit the recursion depth limit, so I guess I'm going to have to experiment with other methods.

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French - Learnt a paragraph that I'm going to be tested on tomorrow. It's not that complex, to be fair, so I should be fine in doing quite well