What's Going On? April 1st through April 5th

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a chance to rest and relax over spring break!  At this point, we have 9 more weeks of school.  Let's see how much we can learn between now and the end of the year!


App Development 1

This week we will begin our work preparing for our end of unit app challenge, tip calculator.  This
week's focus will be on how we can make our code more efficient by using functions.  Rather than retyping code over and over each time we need it, we can write a separate procedure.  We will practice interpreting functions and students will also participate in a functions challenge.



App Development 2

This week, students will be wrapping up our summative app, 'Za Hunter.  With this app, students
determine an app user's location on a map and find the locations of all of the pizza places in the area.  Students will also write their second technical blog post of the semester, focusing on one aspect we have learned about while preparing to create our 'Za Hunter app.





Programming the Web 1

This week, we will work on our eighth unit of the semester.  This week will focus on some additional CSS techniques.  Along with this week, students will need to complete our unit 8 reading guide that goes along with our assigned textbook reading, 10 multiple choice questions, and our web assignment book tutorial, 8A.  Our midterm will appear next week.  Students must have all work for units 1-8 submitted by Friday, April 5th.  After this, late work will not be accepted for the first half of the semester.


AP Computer Science A

This week, we will start talking about searching and sorting.  There are a variety of techniques used
to search and sort through an array of data.  This week will focus on how to perform these operations and how to determine the most efficient method for our required task.

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

App Development 1

This week, students will continue their work on our second end-of-unit-app-challenge, Multiply.  For this app, students will need to read in two numbers from the app user, multiply them together, and display the result.  Students can build onto this "MVP" project by displaying a picture based on the result of the math problem.  Students can also turn this project into a basic calculator by adding in addition, subtraction and division operations.  Students will also have the opportunity to write their second technical blog post.  For this post, students will choose one topic from our unit to explain either in written form or through a screencast demo walking through how we can use one feature we learned about in our unit.






App Development 2

This week, we will continue to focus on MapKit and CoreLocation.  Students will focus on how to determine a user's location and how to perform a "natural language query" search in order to find specific items near a user's current location.  This will set us up to complete our end-of-unit-app-challenge, 'Za Hunter.








AP Computer Science A

This week, we will start our last unit prior to our AP Exam.  We will focus on chapters 13 and 14 from our Big Java textbook to learn about Recursion, Searching and Sorting.  This week, we will specifically focus on recursion.  This is the process of a method calling itself.  For the AP exam, students will need to know how to read and interpret recursive method calls, but will not be required to write a recursive method.

Programming the Web 1

This week, we will focus on lesson 7 where we continue our look at CSS.  Specifically, we will focus on modifying colors and backgrounds on our web pages.  Along with this week, students will need to complete our lesson 7 reading guide by Thursday and complete our lesson 7 review questions during class on Friday.  Students will also have three webpages to complete in order to practice our skill of modifying colors and backgrounds.  Students are considered "on pace" for the class if all of lesson 7 is uploaded by the end of class on Friday.

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

App Development 1

We are going to start off this week by talking about constraints.  This means we will learn how to hackwich "display a number".  This will refresh our memories on how to get information out of a textfield and modify it.  We will finish our unit with our end of unit app challenge, "Multiply".
precisely place elements on our storyboard so that everything appears exactly where we want it.  After this, we will complete our pre-unit





App Development 2

This week, we will focus on "composition", or how a class is defined.  This concept is similar to inheritance in other programming languages.  Along with this week, students will complete a reading, we will go through a demonstration hackwich as a group, and end the week with a formative composition challenge.

AP Computer Science A

This week, students will have a chance to work on their programming project #8 and demonstrate their knowledge of efficiently designing classes, inheritance, and interfaces.  Once this is complete, we will review for our unit 8 summative assessment.  Our summative programming project and summative assessment will occur on Friday, March 15th.

Programming the Web

This week, students will focus on our sixth lesson of the year.  At this point, students have learned the majority of the HTML structure necessary for adding content to our webpages.  Now we will turn our attention to formatting and style with CSS.  Students will need to read chapters 8 and 9 in our textbook, complete the accompanying reading guide (due Thursday), and answer the ten multiple choice questions (Friday).  Along with the week, students will dive into three web page assignments (6A, 6B, and 6C) in order to start applying some color and text styles.  Students are considered "on pace" for the week if lesson 6 web assignments are uploaded by the end of class on Friday.  

Computer Science Summer Opportunities at WCTC

I recently learned of a couple of summer opportunities in Computer Science at WCTC.  Please check them out if you are interested!