Impacts of Computing
What to know
Impacts questions ask you to reason about how computing changes people, institutions, and environments-not just whether a tool works. Know the digital divide (access, affordability, skills, and broadband quality), accessibility and universal design, automation and job displacement/creation, gig work, surveillance, privacy, misinformation, algorithmic bias, filter bubbles, e-waste, energy consumption, intellectual property, open source, and digital citizenship. Consider stakeholders: users, workers, businesses, governments, and communities. Strong answers separate intended benefits from unintended consequences and recognize that adoption is uneven.
Traps
Do not equate correlation with causation, or more technology with more equity. A laptop program may raise access while leaving broadband, technical support, and teacher training gaps. Avoid techno-solutionism-assuming a new app solves a social problem without institutional change. Also watch for sampling bias in data: a model trained on one population may fail another. Questions may ask who is excluded, not only who benefits.
Worked example
A district gives every student a tablet. Evaluate with four questions: Who benefits? Students gain a device. Who bears costs? The district pays for devices, maintenance, and training. Who is excluded? Students without home broadband or quiet study space. What assumptions? That devices alone improve learning. A stronger evaluation measures outcomes such as assignment completion and analyzes results by income and disability status. Rule of thumb: impact analysis = benefits + costs + exclusions + assumptions.
Ethics and Security
What to know
Ethics and security questions combine professional responsibility with technical controls. Know ethical frameworks-utilitarian (outcomes), deontological (duties/rules), and virtue (character)-and apply professional codes such as ACM/IEEE principles: do no harm, be honest, respect privacy, and avoid conflicts of interest. Security rests on the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, availability. Authentication verifies identity; authorization grants permissions; accounting/auditing records actions. Know least privilege, defense in depth, risk assessment, incident response, encryption (symmetric and asymmetric), hashing, digital signatures, TLS, malware, phishing, social engineering, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting. Applicable legal frameworks depend on the actual setting and jurisdiction; examples can include FERPA, HIPAA, COPPA, or GDPR where their scope applies. This is conceptual study, not a ruling that every listed law applies to every school scenario. Legality and ethics remain distinct.
Traps
Encryption is reversible with a key; hashing is one-way and used for integrity and password storage. Authentication is not authorization. Phishing exploits people, not software bugs. Symmetric encryption is fast but needs key distribution; asymmetric encryption helps with key exchange and signatures but is slower. Confidentiality protects secrecy; integrity protects against tampering. A legal action can still be unethical, and an ethical choice can exceed legal minimums.
Worked example
A team stores user passwords. Encrypting them is risky because the key can be stolen and decryption reveals passwords. Better: generate a unique salt per password, hash with a slow password-hashing function such as bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon 2, and store the salt and hash. Verify by rehashing the entered password with the stored salt. Rule of thumb: use the CIA triad to classify a control, then ask what threat it addresses and what residual risk remains.
Teach and assess a computing concept
A classroom objective should describe observable performance, such as tracing a loop, creating an appropriate chart or explaining a security decision from evidence. Choose an activity that exposes the target concept rather than merely copying clicks. Pair programming can make reasoning visible when the roles and feedback are structured; collaboration alone does not demonstrate individual understanding. Ask each learner to explain or modify the result.
Separate formative feedback during learning from a final achievement judgment. A short diagnostic trace can reveal whether a learner confuses assignment with comparison, allowing a focused example before a larger project. Provide accessible materials, keyboard alternatives and offline practice when connectivity is uneven. Evaluate the same concept through suitable formats without treating an accommodation as evidence of reduced ability. Protect identifiable learner records, use authorized resources and check the applicable local education and privacy framework. These are teaching foundations, not a claim about a particular national marking rubric or an official certification requirement.