What's Going On? September 25th through September 29th

Have Trouble Seeing the Screen? There's An App For That!

I have realized that the setup of our lab does not give ideal seating locations for all students in the room.  I have been in contact with our technology department and they have a solution for us! 

A new app should be available for students soon in "Self Service" called "Spark".  Once it is available, students will need to download this onto their iPads.  I can then share the display computer desktop will all students in the room, giving a much better view of our code.  Students will be able to view the display screen on their own iPad and have the ability to zoom in when needed.  Hopefully, this will help to make every seat in the room an ideal seating location.


Programming the Web 1

This week, we will start our fourth unit of the year.  We will focus on how to create different types of links in a web page.  We will focus on absolute links and relative links.  We will also talk about how we can create an e-mail link as well as how to create links within a web page.

Along with this week, students will need to read chapter 6 in our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide by Thursday.  We will have three different web pages to create throughout the week.  On Friday, students will complete their 10 multiple choice questions on the lesson.  This is just a reminder that the questions do count as a summative so be sure to preplan your answers!  Students will be considered "on pace" for the class if unit 4 is completed by the end of class on Friday.


App Development 1

This week, we will begin work on our "Multiply App" unit.  We will start off the week talking about more of the features of a textfield.  Specifically, we will talk about how a textfield can call up a keyboard and dismiss it when we are finished entering in our text.

We will also talk about how to create a "segmented controller" as an alternative to creating a lot of different buttons for our app.  We will finish up the week by talking about algorithms and some of the ways that Swift deals with mathematical operators (addition, subtraction, etc.)


AP Computer Science Principles

Now that our Scratch unit is complete, we will move on to our MIT App Inventor unit.  We will start Monday's class by talking about how a computer thinks about information.  Specifically, we will talk about binary, hexadecimal, and decimal numbering systems.  We will spend a little bit of time learning how to convert between two different systems.

Once we talk number systems, we will move on to creating apps for Android devices.  Students will have some tablets that they can use to test out their creations.  Students who have personal access to an Android device are also welcome to download their apps to their devices.

The MIT App Inventor programming environment is similar to what we have seen in Scratch.  We will use "drag and drop" code in order to create our program but we will have a lot more options and flexibility in what we create.  We will start by looking at some existing code and examining its purpose.  Once we figure out what the code does, we will add some more features to it.