GCSE subjects for being a doctor/dentist/engineer

Engineer:
(Depending on what engineer you want to be)
> Maths (you need this for all)
>Physics ((good for civ, mech, aviation) YOU WILL NEED TO LEARN AUTOCAD)
>Chemistry (Good for Civ, Civ Environmental, Environmental Eng and Chemical)
>Biology (Good for Civ envionmental, Environmental eng, Chemical.)

Doctor/dentist
>Health studies
>All sciences except physics until specialization into certain fields of medicine.

Well in computer science you do learn a programming language

I know but I was wondering how hard it would be or if its even worth taking and if learning the language was necessarily hard.

I've read online it doesn't really matter as long, as you get the sciences and of course Maths and English but I don't have any way of deciding the other subjects I want to take. The two I'm almost sure I'll take is Spanish and Computing because I find both easy and also interesting (I don't want to learn computing language though because it sounds annoying). Maybe DT just because it's fun and as far as I know the non-practical work is basically just chemistry but I might be wrong. I want to know peoples experience for any of the subjects listed and if anyone can recommend a subject to take for either of the jobs that would be great. Also how many subjects can I take in total or how many are recommended lol?

It honestly doesn't matter that much at this stage. So long as you take the most advanced courses for Sciences, including Maths, you should be good. Check with your school whether they provide any extra GCSEs aswell. For example, I did Statistics and Further Maths additionally after school. Further Maths (or FSMQ) was compulsory for our sixth form in Cambridge in order to study Double Maths at A-level.

Besides from those, just choose what you think is either most interesting, or you find the easiest. For example, I chose Geography and Spanish, purely since I find them easier in comparison to History etc.. How many you can take depends on your school tbh, I know people who did 15, but it doesn't put them at any advantage compared to the rest at this point. It will just be more pressure. I would suggest around 10-12.

And no Computer Science / Computing is not difficult, it is pretty basic level; if you are truly interested then it should be a breeze.

I'm not sure why you are planning for a job already, unless you are not aiming to get higher education?

It depends on how quickly you get the hang of it and what language you learn.

But it is a very important part of it - the NEA is a programming project.

Python is probably the easiest to learn - and probably the one you will use.
You have probably already used scratch. This can help you to 'think like a computer' in a way.

It certainly isn't easy.

I'd do DT as the design side is useful for Engineering; check the specification for what the theory involves. (It's not Chemistry)

What I've learnt now has been about electrolysis which wasn't exactly taught to us but was in our booklets and I found it to be a lot like learning Chemistry but I guess it's not.

Scratch is really easy for me so that's good to hear and I want to search up Python and stuff just to know what sort of thing it is and how its related to the work I'm doing now, I was also curious to know if its memory based at all and in which way - since you seem to know about it.

Scratch is really easy for me so that's good to hear and I want to search up Python and stuff just to know what sort of thing it is and how its related to the work I'm doing now, I was also curious to know if its memory based at all and in which way - since you seem to know about it.

Scratch is really easy for me so that's good to hear and I want to search up Python and stuff just to know what sort of thing it is and how its related to the work I'm doing now, I was also curious to know if its memory based at all and in which way - since you seem to know about it.

OK - never heard of DT including that perhaps it does now.

Somewhat it is. Basically, for our exam board at least, we did 2 programming tasks; essentially, the programming only takes a few lessons, but you have to write up a documentation on the software you wrote, around 5-10k words. This seemed to really be quantity over quality from my experience. Then, at the end of Year 11, you will have an exam, based on some theory. For us, it was computer memory, hardware, SQL Databases, ASCII, binary, image representation using binary etc... This is probably the hardest part of the course.

don’t do computing! if it’s anything’s like my school your teacher will never teach you the theory and you’ll end up spending countless hours trying to learn it

Assuming you mean 'computer memory' then all programming languages are memory based in so much as you need to use the computer's memory to store any data which a program you write will be working with. That might be using memory to store data which you read from the user, or maybe from a file, or perhaps some temporary calculated data, or you might write a program which remembers the last thing a user has clicked with their mouse, etc.

Of course, it is possible to write a program which doesn't use any memory, but that program probably wouldn't actually do anything useful.

As far as needing to 'memorise' programming concepts, programming itself really isn't knowledge-based, it's very much about understanding the thought processes you need for solving complex problems. It's not really very useful to try to memorise loads of things about a programming language for the simple reason that nearly anything you might forget for be unsure of is really easy to find on Google. Computer Science exams generally don't test your specific knowledge of a programming language, but they do test your understanding and computational thinking ability.

Other aspects of Computer Science are more knowledge-based (you will need to remember terminology and definitions for an exam, but this is true for nearly any subject). Otherwise the thing most people find difficult about CompSci tend to be around the analytical skills, computational thinking and problem solving.

Scratch is handy for getting the basics of computational thinking - a lot of the constructs you might be familiar with from Scratch will be represented in some form or another using Python. Obviously Scratch is visual, whereas Python (and most other programming languages) are text-based, however the overall structure of the text should feel somewhat familiar.

Scratch is fundamentally based around the same kind of computational thinking which sits behind all other programming languages like Python or Java. Computational thinking often boils down to 3 things - Simple Instructions, Conditional Branching and Iteration (looping). The difference with Python is that you need to understand the syntax (keywords, symbols, and the overall structure of that language), although you can get development tools such as PyCharm which are helpful when writing code in as much as they provide all kinds of auto-checking and autocomplete features so that you don't need to remember so much of the syntax.

Have a look at these online lessons for a good introductory Python crash-course: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python - by the end of these lessons you'll hopefully have a better idea whether or not it's something you might enjoy.

I did DT at GCSE and aim to be engineer. Although it's definitely not necessary, it's a good subject and the majority of the theory is similar to chemistry and geography with a bit of common sense!

I did DT at GCSE and aim to be engineer. Although it's definitely not necessary, it's a good subject and the majority of the theory is similar to chemistry and geography with a bit of common sense!