At the start of your 10 Computer Science, you will look at computer hardware and in particular how the CPU works. We will be looking at various input and output devices and how they interact with the CPU. You will learn, in detail, about the specific instructions used by the CPU. They are written in a special language called assembly language which is a direct translation of binary.

You will learn about the micro components that make up the CPU. You will learn how they gather instructions into a special type of memory called RAM. You will be surprised to know that everything we do on a computer breaks down into 9 instructions and we will look at some of the important ones at the beginning of Year 10. (You will look at the rest in Year 12). The CPU has small pieces of memory called registers that each have a special job.

• The program counter
• CIR – Current Instruction Register
• MAR – Memory Address Register
• MDR – Memory Data Register
• The Accumulator

You will be taking a deep dive into learning about these register and what they do. Take a look at the video below.

The Fetch-Execute Cycle: What's Your Computer Actually Doing? - YouTube

If you know this:-

Before joining Year 10 Computer Science there are a few things worth knowing. Learning about the CPU and its processes are all well and good, but we need to know how this interacts with the rest of a computer. You will need to know what the following input devices do. Some of these seem obvious, but writing about what they do is different to just knowing what they do.

Keyboard:

The keyboard is a device we use to type words into a computer. It includes keys for every letter of the alphabet, numbers and some common symbols like the hash tag #. The keyes are laid out in an ergonomic pattern so that commonly used letters are easy to access. This makes touch typing easier. (Touch typing is a methods of typing very quickly)

Mouse:

The moue is a device for moving a pointer around the screen. We can move a pointer over an icon on the screen and then select that icon by clicking on it. The mouse includes two buttons left and right click. Left click is the main button and right-click offers additional functionality. Some computer mice have a scroll wheel in the middle that can be used to make pages go up and down.

Microphone:

A microphone is used to convert sound from the outside environment (or our voices) into a binary signal that the computer understandings.

The CPU

The Central Processing Unit is a small device that is embedded into a computer. It will take information from an input. Either the Keyboard or Mouse, a storage device like the hard drive, or from the internet via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable. The CPU brings instructions into the CPU where they are processed by the Arithmetic and Logic Unit. A calculation is performed by a special part of the CPU called the ALU and an output is generated. The output signal goes to one of the output devices. The monitor, speakers or to the hard drive or internet.