IB DP Computer Science DP
SL & HL  ·  2027 first-exam curriculum

Beyond the Curriculum

All knowledge base resources related to Beyond the Curriculum.

Beyond the IB syllabus, many fascinating computing topics offer students opportunities to deepen their understanding of modern technology and its applications. Areas such as cybersecurity, ethical hacking, quantum computing, blockchain, game development, and human-computer interaction explore emerging fields that shape today’s digital world. Engaging with these topics encourages curiosity, interdisciplinary thinking, and awareness of the broader impact of computing in society and industry.
.PYC files
Activation Functions
Anti-aliasing
B-trees
BIOS and ROM: where are changes saved?
Buddy Allocator
Buffers and System Buffers in File Processing
Bus transmission speed
Byte stream
Carrier Service
Casting
Character Encoding
Character Stream
Checksums
CIDR
Coffman conditions
Command terms: do’s and don’ts
Comparison Operators
Computing in Biology
Computing in Business
Cost of a miss
Daemons
Data Alignment
Data Integrity
Database Indexes
Decision Trees
Details about L1, L2, and L3 caches
DICOM: Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine
Endianness
Escape Characters in Programming
Floating-point operation
Gray code
Hamming Distance
Heap memory
How Does a Computer Process an Image?
How Solid State Drives (SSDs) Work: An In-Depth Look at NAND Flash Memory
Inside a CPU core and a GPU core
Interpreters vs. Compilers – what really happens when code runs
Interrupts, processes, and schedulers!
Merge Sort
Network Interface
Out-of-Order Execution, Speculative Execution, and Branch Prediction
Pipelining, scheduling and multi-core scheduling
Ports
Primary memory and memory segments
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs)
QUIC (“Quick UDP Internet Connections”)
Quicksort
Random Forests
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): A Deep Dive
Runtime
Security classes
Signed and Unsigned Integers
Sockets
Thread
Time Quantum
Transistors
Understanding Opcodes, Operands, and Control Signals in CPU Instruction Execution
Understanding RAM, the Flat Memory Model, and the Role of the Memory Management Unit (MMU)
Understanding SIMD: Same Instruction, Multiple Data
Understanding Von Neumann Architecture
Units of time
Vector math
Vector registers
Virtualization
What is a device?