Year 10 Digital Technologies: what the course covers, with practice questions and answers

The daily Year 10 Digital Technologies paper has 8 original questions worth 25 to 35 marks. It fits in its networks, cyber security, algorithms and flowcharts, programming, data structures, searching and sorting, and Boolean logic questions. Its CPU, binary and hexadecimal, and image and sound questions are useful background for the data and hardware parts. It doesn't cover databases, web documents or privacy, so use the questions on this page for those.

What Year 10 Digital Technologies covers

In NSW, Years 9 and 10 computing is the elective Computing Technology course from the Computing Technology 7 to 10 Syllabus (2022), taken for 100 or 200 hours, with content on enterprise information systems and software development. There is no state-wide Year 10 exam: your school sets its own tasks.

We wrote the questions below for this page. Try each one before you read the answer.

Year 10 Digital Technologies practice questions

1. An algorithm with logical operators

Question: A sign-up form accepts a password only if it is at least 8 characters long AND contains a digit. Draw the decision as a flowchart, then say which of these are accepted: sunshine, sun5, sunshine7. Answer: only sunshine7. sunshine is long enough but has no digit, and sun5 has a digit but only 4 characters. With AND, both conditions must be true.

2. Testing a program

Question: This Python function should return the largest number in a list. What does it return for [3, 9, 4], and for [−5, −2, −8]? Fix the bug. Answer: it returns 9 for the first list but 0 for the second, because biggest starts at 0, which is larger than every negative number. Start from the first item instead: biggest = numbers[0]. A test case with only negative numbers is exactly the kind that finds this.

def largest(numbers):
    biggest = 0
    for n in numbers:
        if n > biggest:
            biggest = n
    return biggest

3. Databases: entities and relationships

Question: A school library stores Members and Loans. One member can have many loans. Which table holds the foreign key, and write a query for the titles borrowed by member 42. Answer: the Loans table holds the foreign key member_id, because the relationship is one-to-many from Members to Loans. The query is SELECT title FROM Loans WHERE member_id = 42;. Each table's primary key, such as member_id in Members, must be unique.

Spot the primary key in our Databases course, then press Mark.

4. Data compression

Question: A row of pixels is stored as WWWWBBBWWWWW (W for white, B for black). Compress it with run-length encoding and say whether any information is lost. Answer: count each run: 4W3B5W, 6 characters instead of 12. The original can be rebuilt exactly, so run-length encoding is lossless. It works well when data has long runs of the same value, and badly when values change often.

5. Web documents

Question: In a web page, which language gives the structure and which the presentation, and why keep them separate? Answer: HTML marks up the structure (headings, paragraphs, links) around the text content, and CSS sets the presentation (colours, fonts, layout). Keeping them separate means one style sheet can restyle a whole site, and screen readers and search engines can still read the structure.

6. Cyber security threat model

Question: A school app lets students log in with a password. Name one threat, the asset at risk, and a control. Answer: a phishing email tricks a student into typing their password on a fake site; the asset is the student's account and data; a control is multi-factor authentication, so a stolen password alone isn't enough. A threat model lists assets, threats, their likelihood and impact, and the controls for each.

Use the daily paper as a practice test

1. Open today's Year 10 Digital Technologies paper and work to the suggested time, about 30 to 40 minutes.
2. Trace any code or algorithm by hand, writing down each variable as it changes.
3. Mark it and note the topics you lost marks on.
4. Practise databases, web documents and privacy with the questions on this page, since the paper doesn't cover them.

Common Year 10 Digital Technologies mistakes

• Mixing up AND and OR. AND needs both conditions true; OR needs at least one.
• Testing only typical values. Include boundary cases (exactly 8 characters) and unusual ones (negative numbers, empty lists).
• Putting the foreign key on the wrong side of a one-to-many relationship. It goes in the many table.
• Calling every compression lossless. Run-length encoding is; formats like JPEG throw detail away.
• Listing threats without controls in a threat model. Each threat needs a response.

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