Every task in this course names a person. Not a “user”, not a “customer” — a person you can point at, who has a chore they would rather not do, and who will either use what you built or quietly stop using it. That is the whole spine of the course: code is a vehicle for helping people, and a program nobody asked for is a hobby.
The tasks get harder in exactly one way. Unit 1’s person can be your sister. Unit 4’s person is somebody in the school or the neighbourhood who agreed to be interviewed, tested your work in front of you, and kept it afterwards.
Working periods are class time, and how you use them is assessed — How Marks Work explains how, and every success-criteria table below traces back to our Learning Goals. The evidence of your thinking lives in your Code Journal, which every task collects from.
The five tasks
- The Helper Script — a small tool that saves one named person one repeated chore. Small on purpose.
- The Spec Sheet — one real person who needs a computer, turned into specifications you can defend. No programming; all listening.
- The Data Digest — turn a pile of data into something a person can actually act on, and say plainly what it does not show.
- The Green Audit — what the computers in this building actually cost, measured rather than guessed, with a program that does the arithmetic.
- The Toolbox — functions and files, built to be reused by somebody who is not you. The dress rehearsal.
- The Research Brief — one border between computer science and another field, reported honestly in two pages and five minutes.
- The Community App — the culminating project: a real client in the school or local community, a modest problem in their words, built with them across Units 3 and 4 and handed over so they can keep using it.
- Launch Day — the finale: your client runs your app in front of the room, you hand it over properly, and the class critiques with care.
- Final Examination — three hours at the end of the course: reading code, finding faults, writing programs on paper, and short answers on how computing works and what it costs.