These are ATARMAxxing’s course-guide summaries. Review all required areas, including school assessments, practical work, performances or folios where applicable. Follow your course’s option rules.
6 of 6 topics shown · 0 selected for your plan
Programming (Unit 3)
Sequence, selection and fixed, pre-test and post-test iteration; integer, float, string and Boolean data; arithmetic, relational and logical operators and Boolean precedence; functions with parameters, local and global scope, pass by value and by reference; one- and two-dimensional arrays and dictionaries; linear and binary search, bubble, insertion and selection sort and their Big O; classes, objects, inheritance, encapsulation, abstraction and polymorphism. The exam asks for working Python and clear pseudocode, often on 2D arrays and dictionaries in unfamiliar scenarios.
Good practice, testing and debugging (Unit 3)
The investigate-design-develop-evaluate framework, Gantt charts, linear vs iterative development, and good practice such as validating input, a clear mainline, one task per subroutine, stubs, version control, backups and exception handling. Testing covers unit, acceptance and live-data testing (large files, transaction mix, response times, load); debugging covers syntax, logic and runtime errors (division by zero, index out of range), breakpoints, print statements and trace tables.
Network communications (Unit 3)
Compare the OSI and DoD TCP/IP models and the role of each layer; MAC-based switching at layer 2 and IP routing at layer 3; TCP vs UDP; ports, DNS and default gateways; IPv4 vs IPv6 and private vs public addressing; subnet masks, CIDR and subnetting; the PDU at each layer (data, segment, packet, frame, bits); routers, switches, modems, gateways, wireless access points and firewalls; Cisco-convention network diagrams with IP plans; ping and traceroute for troubleshooting.
Cyber security (Unit 4)
External threats (phishing, DoS/DDoS, back doors, IP spoofing, SQL injection, man-in-the-middle, cross-site scripting, malware types, physical threats, zero day vulnerabilities) and internal threats (lost devices, compromised credentials, employee misuse), matched to solutions such as log analysis, anti-malware, firewall filtering, ACLs, intrusion prevention, VPNs, training, codes of conduct and physical security. Analyse incidents with the CIA triad and audit with the AAA framework; explain symmetric and asymmetric encryption, certificates, hybrid secure communication and red vs blue teams.
Ethics and law (Units 3 and 4)
Impacts of software and developers' responsibilities (intellectual property, quality, responding to users, codes of conduct, ergonomics, inclusivity, privacy), plus the Privacy Act 1988, APP5, APP8, APP10, APP11 and APP12, and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, applied to supplied case studies about collecting, storing and securing personal data.
Data management (Unit 4)
Entities, attributes and 1:1, 1:M and M:N relationships; primary, foreign and composite keys; insert, update and delete anomalies; ACID and open database connectivity; data dictionaries, crow's foot ER diagrams and relational notation; referential, domain and entity integrity and data quality; normalisation to 3NF; and SQL to create, modify and query tables, including constraints, cascading deletes, aggregates, GROUP BY, inner joins across up to four tables, calculated and concatenated fields and aliases.
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