ISC Class 12 Computer Science Syllabus

There are two papers in the subject: Paper I is Theory of 3 hours and 70 marks. Paper II is Practical of 3 hours and 30 marks. Paper I is divided into two parts. Part I (20 marks) consists of compulsory short answer questions, testing knowledge, application and skills relating to the entire syllabus.

Part II (50 marks) is divided into three Sections, A, B and C. You are required to answer two questions out of three from Section A (each carrying 10 marks) and two questions out of three from Section B (each carrying 10 marks) and two questions out of three from Section C (each carrying 5 marks). Therefore, a total of six questions are to be answered in Part II.

Section A

1. Boolean Algebra

(a) Propositional logic, well formed formulae, truth values and interpretation of well formed formulae (wff), truth tables, satisfiable, unsatisfiable and valid formulae. Equivalence laws and their use in simplifying wffs.

(b) Binary valued quantities; basic postulates of Boolean algebra; operations AND, OR and NOT; truth tables.

(c) Basic theorems of Boolean algebra (e.g. duality, idempotence, commutativity, associativity, distributivity, operations with 0 and 1, complements, absorption, involution); De Morgan’s theorem and its applications; reducing Boolean expressions to sum of products and product of sums forms; Karnaugh maps (up to four variables).

2. Computer Hardware

(a) Elementary logic gates (NOT, AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR) and their use in circuits.

(b) Applications of Boolean algebra and logic gates to half adders, full adders, encoders, decoders, multiplexers, NAND, NOR as universal gates.

Section B

The programming element in the syllabus (Sections B and C) is aimed at algorithmic problem solving and not merely rote learning of Java syntax. The Java version used should be 5.0 or later.

For programming, the students can use any text editor and the javac and java programs or any other development environment: for example, BlueJ, Eclipse, NetBeans etc. BlueJ is strongly recommended for its simplicity, ease of use and because it is very well suited for an ‘objects first’ approach.

3. Implementation of algorithms to solve problems

The students are required to do lab assignments in the computer lab concurrently with the lectures. Programming assignments should be done such that each major topic is covered in at least one assignment. Assignment problems should be designed so that they are sufficiently challenging. Students must do algorithm design, address correctness issues, implement and execute the algorithm in Java and debug where necessary.

4. Programming in Java

(Review of Class XI Sections B and C)

Items 4 to 13 should be introduced almost simultaneously along with classes and their definitions. While reviewing, ensure that new higher order problems are solved using these constructs.

5. Objects

(a) Objects as data (attributes) + behaviour (methods); object as an instance of a class. Constructors.

(b) Analysis of some real-world programming examples in terms of objects and classes.

(c) Basic input/output using Scanner and Printer classes from JDK; input/output exceptions. Tokens in an input stream, concept of whitespace, extracting tokens from an input stream (String Tokenizer class).

6. Primitive values, Wrapper classes, Types and casting

Primitive values and types: byte, int, short, long, float, double, boolean, char. Corresponding wrapper classes for each primitive type. Class as type of the object. Class as mechanism for user defined types. Changing types through user defined casting and automatic type coercion for some primitive types.

7. Variables, Expressions

Variables as names for values; named constants (final), expressions (arithmetic and logical) and their evaluation (operators, associativity, precedence). Assignment operation; difference between left hand side and right hand side of assignment.

8. Statements, Scope

Statements; conditional (if, if else, if else if, switch case, ternary operator), looping (for, while, do while, continue, break); grouping statements in blocks, scope and visibility of variables.

9. Methods

Methods (as abstractions for complex user defined operations on objects), formal arguments and actual arguments in methods; different behaviour of primitive and object arguments. Static method and variables. The this Operator. Examples of algorithmic problem solving using methods (number problems, finding roots of algebraic equations etc.).

10. Arrays, Strings

Structured data types – arrays (single and multidimensional), address calculations, strings. Example algorithms that use structured data types (e.g. searching, finding maximum/minimum, sorting techniques, solving systems of linear equations, substring, concatenation, length, access to char in string, etc.).

11. Recursion

Concept of recursion, simple recursive methods (e.g. factorial, GCD, binary search, conversion of representations of numbers between different bases).

Section C

Inheritance, Interface, Polymorphism, Data structures, Computational complexity

12. Inheritance, Interfaces and Polymorphism

(a) Inheritance; super and derived classes; member access in derived classes; redefinition of variables and methods in subclasses; abstract classes; class Object; protected visibility. Subclass polymorphism and dynamic binding.

(b) Interfaces in Java (conceptual)

Emphasize the difference between the Java language construct interface and the word interface often used to describe the set of method prototypes of a class.

13. Data structures

(a) Basic data structures (stack, queue, dequeue); implementation directly through classes; definition through an interface and multiple implementations by implementing the interface. Conversion of Infix to Prefix and Postfix notations.

(b) Single linked list (Algorithm and programming), binary trees, tree traversals (Conceptual).