Computer Science
Computer Science is an increasingly important subject, as computers come to play an ever more significant role in our everyday lives. At MCS, we aim to equip our pupils with skills not only to navigate the digital world but also to take an active part in its creation and development.
We focus on computational thinking and problem-solving skills, as these are independent of the technologies used; they are likely to become even more valuable with further technological development in the future.
The school is equipped with three classrooms suited with Linux laptops dedicated exclusively to teaching Computer Science and joined in a network separate from the main school system. There are also two servers that students can use to support their projects, one for machine-learning and the other for web-based projects. This means that our pupils have unique opportunities to develop and run their projects locally using their preferred IDE and other software, as well as freely experiment with networking as part of their courses and extra-curricular activities.
At MCS, we aim to equip our pupils with skills not only to navigate the digital world but also to take an active part in its creation and development
Lower School
Every pupil from 2nd to Lower Fourth have a Computing lesson each week for half of the year (on a rotation alongside drama). These lessons are focused on cross-curricular collaborative projects including robotics, animation and writing interactive fiction adventures.
Middle School
Our two-year course is an optional subject typically chosen by over a third of the pupils in a year group. We follow the AQA GCSE specification, which allows us to particularly focus on algorithms, computational thinking and programming. We teach beyond the curriculum, in terms of both the mathematics and practical programming skills. This helps pupils build a solid foundation of understanding to prepare them for A-Level.
Python programming is a major part of the MCS course. The pupils learn the language in more depth than required to solve exam papers and many of them develop their own larger programming projects throughout the course as extension activities. All our pupils take part in both the Perse Coding Cup and the Bebras competition, a large majority of them qualifying to the second round of the competition.
There are ample other enrichment activities our pupils take part in, such as the National Cipher Challenge, British Informatics Olympiad, AI club and an annual game jam.
Computers do not have to be electronic. In 2012, Matt Parker used 10,000 dominoes to build a computer capable of adding four-bit integers
Sixth Form
MCS pupils have an opportunity to continue studying Computer Science in the Sixth Form. This challenging course dives deep into the mathematical foundations of computing. While A Level Computer Science does not require knowledge of post-GCSE Mathematics, it provides problem-solving and logical reasoning challenges at the highest level.
Within the course, all pupils take part in practical programming classes for two periods every week, taught in small sets of at most ten. The pupils learn by developing projects of their own choice, learning technologies with real commercial use, such as Flask for web development and Kivy for desktop applications.
Further Inspiration
If you are thinking about studying Computer Science in the Sixth Form at MCS, you might want to start reading around the subject before you join. Our Study Preparation guides are a useful tool, detailing further reading around key topics.
Secure data transmission over the Internet is based on properties of prime numbers discovered by Pierre de Fermat in the 17th century
