What's Going On? December 16th through December 20th

Winter Spirit Week!

This week, we will have a spirit week with different themed dress-up days.  On Friday, we will run a modified schedule and there will be an assembly with a student-staff volleyball game at the end of the day.  Please note: Tuesday is also club picture day.  Students should listen to the announcements and report to the auditorium when their group is called.

App Development 1

This week, students will be working on their summative end-of-unit app challenge, Word Play.  This is a Mad-Lib style app where the user is prompted to enter a few words on the first screen.  After a button is pressed, the user is taken to a second screen where the words are inserted into a story.  Students will turn in this assignment before leaving for winter break.

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will wrap up our lessons on modifying images in Python.  Students have now had some time to work with modifying an image pixel by pixel using numpy and by working with the entire image in the Python Imaging Library (PIL).





Programming the Web 1

This week, students will be wrapping up their work on assignment 14a.  Students will be creating their sub-pages for the Clear Reflections Website.  When the assignment is complete, students will host it live online.  Students should also be prepared to complete our ten multiple choice question assessment during class on Tuesday. 


Planning Ahead

For those of you who like to plan ahead, here is the semester exam schedule for January:

What's Going On? December 9th through December 13th

App Development

This week, students will focus on investigating the properties of segues and how to create multiple
view controllers for our apps.  We have already applied this feature once in our pre-unit hackwich called "Intergalactic Travel".  This week will focus on reinforcing those skills.






AP Computer Science Principles


This week, students will take a look at the Python Imaging Library, or PIL.  This will allow students
to manipulate images as a whole using filters as compared to last week when we were able to manipulate images pixel by pixel.  Students will learn how to round the corners and place a frame around all images contained with in a folder.





Programming the Web 1

This week, students will learn about how to take their webpages that have been created locally on
their computers and learn how to host their pages live online on a web server.  Students will learn about the different components associated with hosting a page and will place their completed "Clear Reflections Photography" four page website online.



January Exam Schedule

For those of you who like to plan ahead, check out our exam schedule for January:

What's Going On? December 2nd through December 6th

App Development

This week, we will focus on two important programming concepts: classes and inheritance.  A class is a program-code template used for creating objects.  Essentially, a class sets up a blueprint for how to create something new.  For example, a simple BankAccount class would have some basic information about each client in the bank, including the person's name, account number, and balance.  When we create a new BankAccount object, we would fill it with specific details about a specific client.  The BankAccount class provides the template for how we can create users and work with their data.  Along with this week, students will have a "Classes Playground Reading", a coding challenge, as well as a formative quiz.  Once we wrap up our work with classes, we will work with "Inheritance".  This allows for specific details from one class to be passed down to other classes.  For example, a CheckingAccount class might use, or inherit, all of the information provided in the BankAccount class, plus add its own features such as keeping track of check numbers.



AP Computer Science Principles

We will start off this week by talking about abstraction and its role in programming.  With abstraction, we are able to use things without knowing exactly what makes them work.  For example, a person can drive a car without knowing the specifics of how an engine works.  This is an important concept to understand as students will need to know how to apply it for our AP Create Performance task.  We will spend the rest of the week applying this concept by manipulating images in Python. 

Programming the Web 1

This week, students will work on their web assignment 13A.  Students will be creating the "Clear Reflections Photography" homepage.  This assignment allows students to practice the skill of formatting images for the web in Photoshop as well as practice the skill of creating layouts using CSS.  Along with this week, students will turn in the reading guide for our textbook reading on Tuesday and complete 10 multiple choice questions on Friday.

What's Going On? November 25th and November 26th

Happy Thanksgiving!

Due to the Thanksgiving Holiday, we will have classes on Monday and Tuesday with a break Wednessday through Friday.  Monday will be a "Monday-style" schedule with AE and Tuesday will be a "purple-style" schedule without AE.







App Development

This week, students will wrap up their third summative end-of-unit app challenge, Tip Calculator.  Students will need to complete their reflections and show off their working apps.  Students will receive two grades for the assignment: one for application development (the code) and one for application design (how the app looks).

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will wrap up their work on lesson 1.3, our introduction to Python.  Students will need to submit our assignment on the "for loop", as well as our "while loop" activity.  We will also spend some time looking at some sample AP test questions related to loops.  Since the AP test is "language-neutral", it is important to see how test questions will be presented.

Programming the Web 1

This week, we will dive into how to properly format images for web sites.  We will analyze the major photo types that are supported by web browsers, practice modifying them in photoshop, and then apply our design skills when we return from our Thanksgiving break.

What's Going On? November 18th through November 22nd

App Development 

Monday's class will be devoted to wrapping up our work with conditionals and a brief discussion on "scope" of a variable.  During the rest of the week, students will work on their third summative app challenge of the semester, "Tip Calculator".  For this app, students will calculate the 10%, 15%, 20%, and 25% tip for a restaurant bill.  Students looking to expand on this app will focus on figuring out how to evenly split a check between a designated number of people.  Students will be assessed on two major components of this app: creating functional code and creating an aesthetically pleasing design.





Programming the Web 1

This week, students will dive into lesson 12.  Along with this week, students will read chapters 17 and 19 and complete the accompanying reading guide to help identify the important concepts from the chapters.  During class on Friday, students will complete our 10 multiple choice review questions.  STUDENTS ARE ENCOURAGED TO PRE-PLAN THEIR ANSWERS FOR THIS SUMMATIVE.  Additionally, students will have one web page, assignment 12A, to complete in order to practice the ability to create a page using responsive web design.




AP Computer Science A

This week, students will continue our study of the Python programming language.  Students will focus on looping structures, such as the while loop and the for loop.  Along with this week, students will complete activities 1.3.6 and 1.3.7.

What's Going On? November 11th through November 15th

App Development


This week, we will wrap up our discussion on functions.  Students will spend time during class on Monday writing our fourth installment on our technical blog about functions.  Students will define functions, describe the elements of a function header, and describe how to use/call a function.

Next, we will turn our attention to conditional statements.  Students will spend time practicing how to evaluate a condition and writing algorithms based on defined criteria.  Along with our conditionals study, students will take part in a code challenge, a formative assessment, and another technical blog post.



AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will continue our study of the Python programming language.  Students will spend
some time working with Strings, lists, and tuples.  Toward the end of the week, students will be introduced to some looping structures.  Students will also participate in some practice AP exam questions to help us prepare for the AP exam in May.





Programming for the Web 1

This week, students will continue studying different ways to design layouts using CSS.  During class
on Monday, we will focus on "flexbox".  The flexbox will make it easier for us to design a responsive layout without using the concepts of float and positioning that we focused on during lesson 9.

During the first part of the week, students will participate in a practice exercise that will introduce us to the concept of designing layouts using a flexible container.  Along with this week, students should complete their reading guides by the start of class on Monday and we will take our lesson 9 review questions during class on Thursday.  During class on Thursday and Friday, we will talk about several different ways to design a layout using CSS.

What's Going On? November 4th through November 8th

Parent-Teacher Conferences

There is another opportunity for parent-teacher conferences on Wednesday, November 13th from 5:00-7:00pm.  For this night of conferences, you will need to sign up for a time slot.  Please check out the link and sign up if you would like to meet!

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0f4daba628a1fe3-art




App Development 1

This week, students will dive into the world of functions.  We have been working with functions throughout our semester, but now we will focus on creating and using our own.  Each time a student creates a button and connects it to the code as an action, students are defining a function.  Students will analyze and write function headers.  Toward the end of the week, students will practice writing the entire function in our functions code challenge.  Students will also produce another technical blog post highlighting the purpose of functions as well as their components.

AP Computer Science A

This week, students will continue working within the Python programming language.  Students will

focus on writing if statements, retrieving input from the user, and strings.  Students will have three activities to complete throughout the week.

AP Registration Deadline

Time is running out to register for the AP test while avoiding the late fee.  Students must register and may for the exam by November 8th.  Students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch may apply to have the fee waived.  Please visit our Total Registration website to register.  Also, be sure to declare your intention for the AP exam on the AP Central website.  Complete instructions can be seen here:
https://sdw.waukesha.k12.wi.us//cms/lib/WI02216052/Centricity/Domain/875/North%20AP%20Test%20Letter%20-%20August%202019%20.pdf




Programming for the Web 1

Students will spend Monday and Tuesday of this week wrapping up the midterm assignment.  Students must upload their entire website by the end of class on Tuesday.  If students need some extra time in the lab, it is open from 7:00-7:30am on both days.  Once this is complete, we will move into lesson 9 where we will focus on adjusting layouts using floats and absolute positioning.

What's Going On? October 28th through October 30th

Shortened Week!

This week, students will only have school Monday through Wednesday.  This means that school will begin at 7:35am each day!  Monday will be a regular Monday-style schedule with AE, Tuesday students will attend each of their classes without AE and on Wednesday, we will have an early release with students seeing each of their classes for a shortened period of time.























App Development


Now that we have finished up our Multiply summative app, we will move into our next unit. Students will start off the week with our pre-unit hackwich, Commission.  After this, students will spend the rest of the time for the week learning about app developer's documentation and some more principles of design.



AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will continue our study of the Python programming language.  Students will spend more time with variables, writing functions, and getting user input.  This is one of the options that students will have when designing their "Create" Performance Task that will be submitted to the AP Board in April.

Speaking of the AP test, time is running out to register for the AP test while avoiding the late fee.  Students must register and may for the exam by November 8th.  Students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch may apply to have the fee waived.  Please visit our Total Registration website to register.  Also, be sure to declare your intention for the AP exam on the AP Central website.  Complete instructions can be seen here: 
https://sdw.waukesha.k12.wi.us//cms/lib/WI02216052/Centricity/Domain/875/North%20AP%20Test%20Letter%20-%20August%202019%20.pdf



Programming the Web 1

This week, students will begin their work on our midterm exam.  Students will have time in class to recreate a four-page website based on images.  During this exam, students may use their notes, Google, past assignments, etc.  However, students must not work together on this project.  All work for our midterm MUST BE COMPLETED IN CLASS.  Students who need additional time to complete their midterm project may schedule additional time in the lab with me. 

What's Going On? October 21st through October 25th

App Development 1

This week, students will be working on our second summative end-of-unit app challenge, Multiply.  For this assignment, students will be demonstrating their use of textfields and actions in order to make a simple calculator.  Students will also work in conditional statements in order to show a variety of images based on the calculator's result.  For this assignment, students will be assessed on their knowledge of code and their ability to design an aesthetically-pleasing app.







AP Computer Science A
This week, students will be wrapping up their practice performance "create" task using MIT App Inventor.  For this task, students will create an app for Android devices and write analysis responses.  This project is in the same format as will be used for our official performance tasks that will be submitted to the AP Board in May.


AP Registration Deadline Coming Soon!

The deadline to register and pay for the AP exam is November 8th.  Students who register after this date will have a significant late fee.  Please see the instructions for how to register for the AP exam: https://sdw.waukesha.k12.wi.us//cms/lib/WI02216052/Centricity/Domain/875/North%20AP%20Test%20Letter%20-%20August%202019%20.pdf. Please note that there are two parts to the registration process this year.  Students must declare that they intend to take the exam through our AP Central account AND must register with Total Registration: https://user.totalregistration.net/AP/502389.



Programming the Web 1

This week, students will be wrapping up our seventh unit on adding images and colors to our web pages.  Once this is complete, students will work on our eighth unit where we will focus on the "Box Model".  Understanding this will allow students to have better control over the spacing in our webpages.  Students are considered "on pace" for the course if lesson 8 is uploaded by the end of class on Friday.

What's Going On? October 14th through October 18th

Parent-Teacher Conferences This Week!

This is a reminder that we will hold parent-teacher conferences this week on Wednesday, October 16th from 5:00-7:00pm in the fieldhouse.  Please stop by!





App Development

This week, students will focus on adding text fields to our apps.  Students will learn how to get a value out of a text field and how to use it somewhere else in the program.  This will help us prepare for our summative end-of-unit app challenge, Multiply, where students will learn to make a very basic calculator.  Along with this week, students will complete a text field code challenge and create a new technical blog post highlighting our new-found knowledge of how to work with text fields.

AP Computer Science Principles

Last week we worked on analyzing sample student submissions for the APCSP "Create" Performance

Task.  Now that we know what type of responses the AP board is looking for, we will attempt our own summative "Create" task using MIT App Inventor.  Students will work on creating a simple app of their own design, create a short 1-minute video highlighting the features of the app, and write some reflection questions about the program as well the design process.

Programming the Web 1

This week, students will spend the first part of the week working on our lesson 6 web assignments.  Students have three tutorial-based lessons from the textbook to work on in order to practice their skill of adding style to a web page document.  Once this is done, we will spend the rest of the week focusing on adding images and colors to the background of our pages as well as modifying the features of our links.

What's Going On? October 7th through October 11th

App Development 1

At the beginning of this week, we will wrap up our discussion and practice with mathematical and logical operators.  Students will practice these skills through our "Operators Code Challenge" assignment and demonstrate their knowledge on a quiz on BlackBoard.  Towards the end of the week, we will start out a more formal discussion on textfields.  Students will gain experience getting data from our app users and processing it. 



Programming the Web 1

During class on Monday, students will wrap up our fifth lesson of the year.  All lesson 5 image assignments (5a and 5b) must be uploaded to BlackBoard by the end of class on Monday.  On Tuesday we will begin our sixth unit where students will focus on adding style to their webpages through CSS.  Along with this week, students will need to read chapters 11 and 12 while completing the accompanying reading guide.  This will be due at the beginning of class on Thursday.  On Friday, students will complete our weekly 10 multiple-choice questions.  Students will also have three tutorial-based web assignments to create and turn in.

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will continue working with the MIT App Inventor platform.  Students will work with several different functions available in App Inventor and work on connecting it to what we have learned about variables roles.  Students will also have some time to modify some existing code.  Students will be working on Activities 1.2.4 and 1.2.5 from our PLTW curriculum this week.  

What's Going On? September 30th through October 4th

Happy Homecoming Week!

If you are interested in participating in our spirit week, here is a list of the themes:

App Development 1

Now that we have wrapped up our first summative app, Hello World, it is time to move on to our next unit.  During this week, we will focus on Apple Documentation and the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIGS) as they apply to best practices for writing code and designing the look of our apps.  We will also talk about operators and how we can perform mathematical operations within the context of our app.

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will begin to explore a new programming language, MIT App Inventor.  It is similar to

Scratch in that it is a "drag and drop" block-based programming language.   In our study, we will learn how to create apps for Android devices.  Since this course is considered to be "language-neutral", we will look at the basic building blocks that go into programming.  We will be able to compare and contrast the two different programming platforms that we have worked with so far this year.  Even though the two languages are different and come with their own specific rules, we will start to recognize the similarities that exist between all programming languages: including variables, conditional statements, and looping structures. 



Programming the Web 1


This week, we will dive into our fifth lesson of the year where we will focus on images.  Students
will be responsible for reading chapters 7 and 10 in our textbook while completing the accompanying reading guide to help us pick our the most important concepts.  Students will have two web assignments to work on throughout the week and will complete our ten review questions during class on Friday.  Additionally, this week, students will be introduced to the web design software "DreamWeaver".  This is an industry-standard program that will help students create pages. This software is quite powerful and will aid in our web-design creation.  This program is not likely to be available outside of our classroom so it is very important that students use all class time wisely in order to complete our web assignments.  Students who need additional time to complete their work will need to make arrangements with me to come in before school to work in the lab.

What's Going On? September 23rd through September 27th

App Development 1

This week, students will complete our first summative end-of-unit app challenge, Hello World.  For
this project, students will demonstrate their knowledge of adding objects to the storyboard and modifying their properties through the attribute inspector.  Students will also demonstrate how to make modifications to objects through the code with IBOutlets and variables.  Students will be assessed on their ability to design storyboard as well as their ability to work with objects in the code.

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will work on their summative Scratch story/game.  Students will create the game on their own or in partners.  Once this is complete, students will use this as an opportunity to practice for the "Create" performance task that will be submitted to the AP Board in May.  Students will create a 1-minute video highlighting the features of the app. Students will also write a few short reflections on the purpose of the app, the development process, as well as explaining a few elements of the code.





Programming the Web 1

This week, students will learn how to create links on a web page.  We will learn how to link to an external page, to a page within our website, as well a link within a website (this is called linking to a fragment).  Along with this week, students will read chapter 6 in our textbook, complete the accompanying reading guide, as well as take our multiple-choice 10-question assessment.  Additionally, students will have two web assignments to complete to practice these skills.

What's Going On? September 16th through September 20th

App Development 1


This week, we will take a look at how to create variables and constants within an app.  These tools
allow us to keep track of different information to be used and referenced within the context of our app.  Students will read through and try out variable creation within our "Playground" environment.  We will also create a demo app to try out our skills together.  We will end the week with a "Variables Code Challenge" formative assessment as well as a brief quiz.

AP Computer Science Principles

Students will start off the week by wrapping up their formative assignments on variable roles.  We will start class on Tuesday by taking a brief formative assessment checking in on our level of understanding of these roles.  Once this is complete, students will start their first summative assessment.  Students will create an app in Scratch and analyze its components.  This assessment will also serve as a practice performance task, getting students prepared for when we submit our final portfolio pieces to the AP board in April.



Programming the Web 1

This week, we will dive into our third lesson of the year.  Students will learn how to mark up our
content using different HTML tags.  We will focus on how to create lists, mark up quotes, and dates.  Students will also learn how use tags to structure a page using tags such as <div>, <span>, <section>, and <article>.  Along with this week, students will need to read chapter 5 in our textbook and complete the reading guide.  We will also have 3 web page assignments to create.  We will finish the week with our 10 multiple choice questions about our markup structure.