AQA Computing Unit 1 Exam Just 1st 2015

I think I'm pretty well prepared for this exam, but I don't want to speak too soon.

I've created flash cards to help me quickly recall certain things for specific topics and covered a lot of programming for the skeleton code (which of course takes up about a third of the marks in the exam).

Just for other peoples benefit, I think these things are very important to cover for the upcoming COMP1 exam the coming Monday.

Theory Element:
-Sound (this comes up every year according to my speculation)
-Signed and Unsigned binary calculations (comes up as the first few questions more often than not and gives an easy 5 marks at least).
-Finite State Machines (I saw the EAD and predict that Q13 is a FSM question based on the way the table looks like).
-Find a stepper, fixed, user-defined data type and an array value in the skeleton program for Section C.

Programming Element:
-Manipulate pieces behaviour to behave like Chess pieces (this is probably very likely)
-Learn to create and implement a save/load function in the skeleton program (the last question from the EAD has 18 marks and save/load function is the only thing that comes to mind which can possible contain that many marks - considering that whatever it may be, it must be easily programmable in any language).
-Try creating a Witch piece (coz why would AQA hint it in the preliminary material and not deliver on the clues...)

If anyone has objections or further additions, please let me know! I'm eager to be as prepared as I possible can for this exam!

The witch piece, how do you think it will move because the logic behind an infinite diagonal moving piece such as a queen from chess would require quite a bit of brainstorming, I'm hoping it takes the place of the ZigZag education booklet Witch where it can 'Fly' to any tile within 2 Squares, thats a nicer piece...

Also the save feature, do you think you would need to save whose turn it is, because I cannot get my load feature to return whoseturn it is without it changing to white somewhere...

Can someone post the code for a witch piece and a code for save game vb?

Can someone link me to the electronic answer document?

Anyone else think AQA where a bit cheeky in this paper? Section A was fine and expected. Section B was pretty easy but a few people will be thrown with MOD. Section C was harder with a truth table for some code. Section D was different which made it harder. We are all used to writing code in subroutines but most of the questions got you to write it inside the main program. The last saving question was quite ridiculous. You had to read in the array to a variable, then remove all the letters, then make black lowercase, then add a / and then reload it. Overall it was alright, but a bit cheeky. Any thoughts?

In Python the last question was difficult but completable.

Make a for loop for each Rank. (For Rank in range(1, 9))

Inside make another for loop for each File. (For FIle in range(1, 9))

Inside the for loop read the Board[Rank] [File] to a variable. This is the piece you will be working with.

Read the second character and make it upper or lowercase depending on if the first character is W or B.

At the end of each Rank add a "/"

The difficult part is making it so that it prints the number of spaces in a row instead of each space individually.

For this I decided that if there was a space instead of letters add 1 to a count.

If you find a piece that is not a space (the chain of spaces is over) and the space count is more than 0 then print this number, reset your count of spaces and carry on as normal...

Also add a check at the end of each Rank to make sure the space count has been added (for ranks that are all spaces)

That is how I did it...

Last question was very difficult indeed, for Pascal I went down more of a double for loop with 3 selection statements, a Variable to store the number of spaces, a number to store that in string value, 2 stepper variables and a lot of logic, it worked and then at the end just had to reset the count variable to 0 and the string to empty... Was completable but bloody hell took me some time....

Also anyone get the incorrect Hamming Code digit to be the 6th one?

Yeah, got 6 as well, 2 and 4 incorrect. Took some time to explain it in the previous question!