Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science
September 2026 - GCSE Computer Science 5-a-day
Every GCSE Computer Science sheet published in September 2026, with answers. Systems, data representation, networks, algorithms and programming.
Every sheet in September 2026
The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.
- 1st September 2026Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
- 2nd September 2026State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
- 3rd September 2026A company backs up its files onto magnetic tape cartridges, each with a capacity of 3 TB. The company needs to back up 20 TB of data. Calculate the minimum number of cartridges needed.
- 4th September 2026State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
- 5th September 2026Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
- 6th September 2026Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
- 7th September 2026Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
- 8th September 2026An array called items contains [12, 45, 7, 30, 19] at indices 0 to 4. Describe how a linear search would locate the value 30, stating the number of comparisons needed.
- 9th September 2026Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
- 10th September 2026Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
- 11th September 2026Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
- 12th September 2026Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
- 13th September 2026Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
- 14th September 2026State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
- 15th September 2026State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
- 16th September 2026Trace this algorithm with data = [4, 9, 2, 9, 7] and state the final output. total = 0; count = 0; for i = 0 to 4: if data[i] > 5 then total = total + data[i] and count = count + 1; next i; print(total, count).
- 17th September 2026Define the term 'pixel'.
- 18th September 2026Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
- 19th September 2026Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
- 20th September 2026Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
- 21st September 2026A function is defined as: FUNCTION addTax(price) RETURN price x 1.2 ENDFUNCTION. Another line of code runs: total <- addTax(20) + addTax(30). Trace both function calls and state the final value of total.
- 22nd September 2026A 1 TB hard disk drive costs 40 pounds. A 500 GB solid-state drive costs 60 pounds. Calculate the cost per gigabyte of each device, and state which is cheaper per GB. Use 1 TB = 1000 GB.
- 23rd September 2026Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
- 24th September 2026A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
- 25th September 2026A table called staff has fields staffId, name, department and salary, storing these records: staffId | name | department | salary, 1 | Ben | Sales | 24000, 2 | Chloe | IT | 31000, 3 | Dan | Sales | 27000. State which staffId(s) would be returned by: SELECT staffId FROM staff WHERE department = 'Sales' AND salary > 25000;
- 26th September 2026A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
- 27th September 2026An array contains [9, 2, 6], to be sorted using insertion sort. Show the state of the array after each new element has been inserted into its correct position.
- 28th September 2026Complete: NOT 0 = ?
- 29th September 2026Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
- 30th September 2026State what LAN stands for.