Heads Tails Heads – probability problem

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Problem:

  1. Write a problem to simulate the tossing of a sequence of successive coin tosses.
  1. Search the suitably generated sequence to find a particular pattern, e.g., HTH. Report where this sequence was found – after how many flips in the generated sequence. Allow the user to enter the pattern to look for via the UI (User Interface).
  1. Modify your program to repeat steps 1 and 2 a variable number of times; allow the user to specify this value in the UI. Each repeat should use the same search pattern, but a new sequence of source coin tosses.
  1. Modify your program to keep track of where the pattern was found in each generated sequence. Report the overall average number of coin tosses required to the find the search pattern across all of the repeats.
  1. If your program is correct, you will find that the average number of tosses necessary to find the search pattern HTH is 10, however, HTT it is 8. Why is this (this is another conditional probability problem)?

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Poundland Pedagogy

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We were asked to go to Poundland with £10 to spend on getting items that would help us teach a Computing lesson. My colleague and I chose to teach the fundementals of OOP and objects usin a selection of toys that we bought – eg some rubber balls, plastic cars, dinosaurs etc.
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Using a flipped classroom approach for OCR A level Computing

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flipped-classroom-bloomsFROM CAS http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/forums/23/topics/4687

Using a flipped classroom approach  come up with a delivery and assessment strategy to go with from September. We’re also busy making all the flipped classroom videos for every spec point for OCR H446/H046.

The videos are freely available on YouTube:

http://www.tinyurl.com/craigndaveyoutube

Please use them as you wish. They’re not all there yet, but they will be! New ones every day. The playlists will be useful.

These do go hand in hand with other resources we are making at www.craigndave.org

Sorry, some of it is subscription because we’re spending hours making this stuff when we could be in the sunshine! Seems only fair. Videos will always be free though and will be updated all the time to match new exam board guidance, past papers etc.

We hope some of you might find this useful.

Of course we are happy to take any feedback.

Mr C Sargent, Head of Computing Archway School – Stroud (Lead School NoE)