Year 8 Computing: Autumn Assessment

The Computer Misuse Act 1990. The offence is the unauthorised access itself, so it applies even if nothing is changed and it was meant as a joke.

An active digital footprint is made up of the things you deliberately put online yourself, such as photographs, comments, videos and profiles. A passive digital footprint is the data collected about you without you doing anything at all, such as which pages you visit, how long you stay on them, your location and what you search for.

Pattern recognition means spotting the things that are the same or similar in a problem, so that one solution can be used again rather than solving each part separately. For example, if a program has to work out the area of six different rectangles, you notice that every one of them follows width multiplied by height, so you write that calculation once and use it six times instead of writing six separate pieces of code.

The first sign is the urgency. Saying the account will close in 24 hours is designed to panic you into acting before you have had time to think, and real organisations do not work that way. The second sign is that it asks for a password. No legitimate company ever asks you to confirm your password by email, so this on its own is enough to know the message is fake. The third sign is the link, which will lead to an address that is not quite the company's real one, and messages like this often also use a generic greeting such as Dear customer and contain spelling mistakes.

Misinformation is false information shared by someone who genuinely believes it is true, so the person passing it on is mistaken rather than dishonest. Disinformation is false information spread deliberately in order to mislead people, so the person creating it knows perfectly well that it is untrue. The difference is the intention behind it. Before sharing a story I would check whether it is being reported by other independent news organisations, because a genuine major story is always covered in more than one place, and I would check the date, since old stories are constantly recirculated as though they had just happened.

Two factor authentication means that a password on its own is never enough to log in, because the account also demands a second piece of proof. That second factor is normally something you physically have, such as a code sent to your phone, a code produced by an authenticator app, or your fingerprint. An attacker who has stolen or guessed the password is somewhere else entirely and does not have your phone, so they are stopped at the second step, and the code arriving unexpectedly also warns you that the password is no longer secret.

They should not reply, because a reaction is exactly what the person sending the messages wants and replying usually makes it worse. They should take screenshots of everything first, because messages can be deleted and evidence is what makes a report worth acting on. Then they should block and report the account through the game itself, and tell an adult they trust, such as a parent or a teacher. Reporting is not telling tales and they are not the one in trouble.

The rectangle is a process box, used for an action or a calculation such as adding one to a total. The diamond is a decision, which holds a question and always has exactly two exits, labelled yes and no, so the flow splits down one of two paths. The parallelogram is used for input and output, so it covers asking the user to enter something and displaying a result on the screen.

Decomposition means breaking a big problem into smaller problems that are each small enough to solve. Here the program breaks into four clear jobs: asking for the number of dinners ordered on each day, storing those five numbers so they are not lost, working out which of them is the largest, and displaying that day on the screen. Once the problem is split up like this, each part can be written and tested on its own, so a fault in the part that finds the largest number cannot be confused with a fault in the part that collects the data. It also makes the work much easier to share between two people.

The loop runs with i taking the values 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The condition is true only when i is odd, so it is true for 1, 3 and 5. When i is 1, total becomes 0 plus 1, which is 1. When i is 2 the condition is false, so total stays at 1. When i is 3, total becomes 1 plus 3, which is 4. When i is 4 nothing changes, so total is still 4. When i is 5, total becomes 4 plus 5, which is 9. The final value printed is 9.

total = 0. Then for i = 1 to 3, number = input('Enter a number'), total = total + number, next i. Then average = total / 3. Then print('The average is ' + average). Using a loop keeps it short, but writing three separate input lines and adding them together is equally acceptable as long as the total is divided by three and the answer is printed.

Normal test data would be 45, a typical mark that should simply be accepted. Boundary test data would be 0 and 100, the two values right at the edge of what is allowed, and 101 just outside it. Erroneous test data would be hello, which is not a number at all and should be politely rejected rather than crashing the program. Boundary data is the most useful because that is exactly where programming mistakes hide. A condition written as greater than 0 rather than greater than or equal to 0 works perfectly for 45 and fails only at the edge, so testing in the middle of the range would never find it.

Everything posted on a public account becomes part of a permanent active digital footprint. Even if the photographs are deleted later, anyone who has seen them can screenshot or download them first, so deleting the original does not delete the copies. That matters because universities and employers do look at public social media, and something posted at thirteen can still be found years later. The photographs themselves also give away more than the student intends: location tags show exactly where they were, and a set of holiday pictures posted while the family is still away tells everybody that the house is empty. Before posting, they should check the privacy settings so that only people they know can see the pictures, turn off location tagging, wait until they are home, and ask anyone else in the photographs whether they mind appearing.