In S3 they come to the department for three periods per week, allowing the content to be much more in-depth compared to S1 and S2.

The S3 Computing Science course allows learners to build on their previous Computing Science skills to prepare them to tackle courses in the Senior Phase.  In addition, they get the opportunity to explore other areas of Computing Science.  In the Games Programming unit, the learners can attempt the SQA's Games Development Unit at either N4 or N5.

Units covered:

• Programming an animation with Alice

• Games Programming with GameMaker

• 3D modelling using Blender

• Web page design using HTML, CSS and Javascript

• Programming with Python

Links to software used.

Some are online and learners register with their school email or Microsoft account:

Alice - We use version 2 available here  https://www.alice.org/get-alice/

GameMaker - We use version 8.0 Lite. Other versions available here https://gamemaker.io/en

Blender - Due to network limitations we use versions 2.64 and 2.73. They are available here https://www.blender.org/

Web Design  - We use a text editor to create code and a web browser to view results.  A good free text editor is Notepad++  https://notepad-plus-plus.org/   We also use a free image manipulation package GIMP available here:  https://www.gimp.org/

Python - We currently use Replit as an on-line development environment  https://replit.com/  We also have an installed version Thonny downloadable from here https://thonny.org/