In this paper, we first prove the weak intermittency, and in particular the sharp exponential order Cλ 4 t of the second moment of the exact solution of the stochastic heat equation with multiplicative noise and periodic boundary condition, where λ > 0 denotes the level of the noise. In order to inherit numerically these intrinsic properties of the original equation, we introduce a fully discrete scheme, whose spatial direction is based on the finite difference method and temporal direction is based on the θ-scheme. We prove that the second moment of numerical solutions of both spatially semi-discrete and fully discrete schemes grows at least as exp{Cλ 2 t} and at most as exp{Cλ 4 t} for large t under natural conditions, which implies the weak intermittency of these numerical solutions. Moreover, a renewal approach is applied to show that both of the numerical schemes could preserve the sharp exponential order Cλ 4 t of the second moment of the exact solution for large spatial partition number., ∀p > 0. The random field u is called intermittent (also called fully intermittent) if for all x, the mapping p → γp (x)/p is strictly increasing on p ∈ [1, ∞). This Key words and phrases. Stochastic heat equation • Weak intermittency • Sharp exponential order • Numerical scheme • Discrete Green function.