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Description
Flashcards by Jamie Sanchez-Griffiths, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Jamie Sanchez-Griffiths
about 6 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| what is Decomposition? | Decomposition is one of the four cornerstones of Computer Science. It involves breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller parts that are more manageable and easier to understand |
| Why is decomposition important? | If a problem is not decomposed, it is much harder to solve. Dealing with many different stages all at once is much more difficult than breaking a problem down into a number of smaller problems and solving each one, one at a time. Breaking the problem down into smaller parts means that each smaller problem can be examined in more detail. |
| What is pattern recognition? | Pattern recognition is one of the four cornerstones of Computer Science. It involves finding the similarities or patterns among small, decomposed problems that can help us solve more complex problems more efficiently. |
| what are patterns? | patterns are similarities between stuff (if you didn't know already) |
| Why do we need to look for patterns? | Finding patterns is extremely important. Patterns make our task simpler. Problems are easier to solve when they share patterns, because we can use the same problem-solving solution wherever the pattern exists. |
| What happens when we don’t look for patterns? | Suppose we hadn’t looked for patterns in cats. Each time we wanted to draw a cat, we would have to stop and work out what a cat looked like. This would slow us down. |
| What is abstraction? | Abstraction is one of the four cornerstones of Computer Science. It involves filtering out – essentially, ignoring - the characteristics that we don't need in order to concentrate on those that we do. |
| Why is abstraction important? | Abstraction allows us to create a general idea of what the problem is and how to solve it. The process instructs us to remove all specific detail, and any patterns that will not help us solve our problem. This helps us form our idea of the problem. This idea is known as a ‘model’. |
| What is an algorithm? | Algorithms are one of the four cornerstones of Computer Science. An algorithm is a plan, a set of step-by-step instructions to solve a problem. If you can tie shoelaces, make a cup of tea, get dressed or prepare a meal then you already know how to follow an algorithm. |
| What is evaluation? | Evaluation is the process that allows us to make sure our solution does the job it has been designed to do and to think about how it could be improved. |
| Why do we need to evaluate our solutions? | Computational thinking helps to solve problems and design a solution – an algorithm – that can be used to program a computer. However, if the solution is faulty, it may be difficult to write the program. Even worse, the finished program might not solve the problem correctly. |
| What happens if we don’t evaluate our solutions? | Once a solution has been decided and the algorithm designed, it can be tempting to miss out the evaluating stage and to start programming immediately. However, without evaluation any faults in the algorithm will not be picked up, and the program may not correctly solve the problem, or may not solve it in the best way. |
| How do we evaluate our solution? | There are several ways to evaluate solutions. To be certain that the solution is correct, it is important to ask: does the solution make sense? does the solution cover all parts of the problem? does the solution ask for tasks to be repeated? |
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