My advice for projects/courseworks is to start them ASAP. We’ve never had a pupil who’s managed to complete their project in the time given. That’s not to say they did badly, they just had to cut out extra bits that they wanted to do. What was left was still enough to satisfy the content requirements.
Our pupils mostly do courseworks with a Web primary focus and a Database as a secondary focus. This involves them building a site that they log into (that alone should be enough for part of the AH requriements as there only needs to be a single table and they only need to use 1 query). They use session variables to display the user’s first name on pages and have a media query to alter the layout on one or more pages. The content varies – I’ve had someone build a revision website for Bus. Ed. where users could select a topic and the site would pull questions out of a table and display them. There have also been courseworks to do with game reviews (one had the review in a form get entered into a second table).
We sometimes get the one pupil who wants to do a programming coursework and what they tend to do is build a small game which is then embedded onto a webpage with a scoreboard. We’ve never had anyone do a DDD focus, which isn’t surprising since it requires 4 linked tables with more complex queries.
Whilst the web coursework seems to be easier for the majority of our pupils, it does have more to do. That being said, part of the documentation from then SQA (an initial document that helps pupils decided whether their project meets the requirements) seems to suggest pupils only need to implement 2 things from the AH list. We queried this with Greg Reid and he explained that there was a mistake there – that was specifically for a software focus. I’ve not seen any updates to the documentation to address this so watch out for pupils who focus on that.
Hope this is of some help.
Alex
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