What's Going On? December 20th through December 22nd

  Happy Holidays!

Wishing you a restful and relaxing winter break!

Schedule for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will continue to take a look at how to use Tkinter to create a graphical user interface (GUI) for our program.  We will also look at how we can make our code more efficient and less error-prone.  Students should complete Activity 2.1.5 (Securing Sloppy Code) prior to leaving for winter break.

App Development 1

This week, students will complete our pre-unit hackwich called "Intergalactic Traveler".  In this app, students will learn how to create multiple screens for our app and pass information between the screens.

Programming the Web 1

This week, students will focus on wrapping up our work for lesson 13.  Students should turn in their lesson 13 reading guides on Monday and we will complete our lesson 13 multiple-choice questions on Tuesday. Students should submit their "Clear Reflections" home page by the end of class on Wednesday.

What's Going On? December 13th through December 17th

Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will focus on creating programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) with Tkinter.  Students will work on using multiple screens and learning how to design and place elements into a frame for presentation.

App Development

This week, students will be working on the "Tip Calculator" summative end-of-unit app challenge.  In this app, the user can enter the amount that needs to be paid for a bill at a restaurant.  With the tap of a button, the tip amount will be calculated.  

Programming the Web 1

The first part of this week will be devoted to our lesson 12 project. In this textbook tutorial, students will demonstrate their ability to make a website responsive with media queries.  This means that we can design different looks for a webpage for when it appears on a desktop and when it appears on a phone screen.  Students will turn in their lesson 12 reading guide on Monday and complete their lesson 12 review questions during class on Tuesday.  On Wednesday, we will shift our focus to lesson 13 where we will learn how to get images ready to display online with Photoshop.

What's Going On? December 6th through December 10th

 Thought for the Week

Hour of Code Opportunity

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries.  Join us to learn a little bit about the growing field of computer science on Wednesday, December 8th in room 300.  See Mrs. Kamenar if you have any questions!

AP Computer Science Principles

This week we will continue our study of Cybersecurity.  Students will complete an activity where we talk about encryption and how we can safely send information through the internet.  We will end the week by reading about how how to increase password strength and multi-factor authentication.

App Development 1

This week, our primary focus will be on Gesture Recognizers.  We will learn how to respond to a tap, double tap, and some of the other gestures we might use on the screen of our phone.  Students will also have a technical blog post to summarize their learning of conditionals.

Programming the Web 1

The majority of this week will be focused on lesson 11, where we learn some more layout techniques using CSS.  For this week, students will be responsible for completing our lesson 11 Mt. Olympus web page.

What's Going On? November 22nd and November 23rd

Happy Thanksgiving!

Modified Schedule for the Week

This week, students will have school on Monday and Tuesday.  We will not have school Wednesday through Friday for Thanksgiving break. Here is the schedule we will follow next week:

AP Computer Science Principles

During our two class days, students will wrap up our second summative assessment for the year.  For this summative, students have been challenged to create a game that uses movement, as well as a variety of other components.  Students have two parts to the assignment: creating the game and analyzing the code that went into creating the game.  All work for this summative and unit 1.2 is due by Tuesday, November 23rd.

As part of our AP Exam, students will need to create an app and analyze its contents.  In order to prepare for this official assignment, we are completing this practice "Create" project.  This is the second of our practice "Create" tasks that we have done for the year.  

App Development

The focus of this week will be on conditional statements.  So far, the majority of the code that we have
written executes one statement after the next.  The use of conditional statements will allow us to pick and choose which code is performed based on meeting different conditions.

Web 1

This week, students will focus on wrapping up our lesson 9 on floating and positioning.  Students will turn in their lesson 9 reading guides during class on Monday.  On Tuesday, we will complete our weekly multiple-choice question summative and turn in our 9th Web Assignment of the semester.  Students who need additional time to complete their work are encouraged to come in before school or during our lunchtime JIT session.

What's Going On? November 15th through November 19th

Sign up For Conferences: Wednesday, November 17th

Our next opportunity for parent-teacher conferences is on Wednesday, November 17th.  These conferences are available by appointment only.  Please click on the link below to sign up for a time slot.

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

Thought for the Week

How would you classify your mindset?

AP Computer Science Principles

Monday's class will be devoted to wrapping up Activity 1.2.4: Turtle Escape.  In this project, students will use loops and conditionals in order to create the drawing of a maze that includes doors and barriers.  Students will also add a game piece that is controllable pressing keys on the keyboard.

Once this activity is complete, students will move into our summative activity 1.2.5: Shall We Play A Game?  In this activity, students will design and implement a game that demonstrates their ability to use loops, lists, key presses, functions, along with some other elements that we have worked with over the course of the year so far.  When students are done with the summative, they will create a brief video and answer some reflection questions.  This is the second opportunity for students to practice making the "Create" task that we will submit to the AP board as part of our AP score in May.

App Development

We will spend the majority of this week focused on functions.  In programming, we can use functions to make our code more efficient.  Anytime that we find ourselves copying and pasting code from one place to another, it would be best to write a function.  This week, we will learn about the make up of functions, write our own custom functions, and work on our functions code challenge.  We will end this week by talking about the scope of variables.

Web 1

The first half of the week will be spent on finishing up our midterm assignment.  All midterms must be completed and turned in by the end of class on Tuesday.  After this, we will move on to lesson 9.  In this lesson, we will talk about how we can modify the "flow of control", or how items are placed on our webpage.  We will be able to modify the placement of text and images through "floating" and through "absolute positioning".  Along with this lesson, students will read chapter 15 from our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide.  We will complete two tutorial-style assignments to demonstrate our ability to use the float and absolute positioning property.  We will end the lesson with our multiple-choice questions.

What's Going On? November 8th through November 12th

Thought for the Week

 Parent-Teacher Conferences by Appointment

Would you like to schedule a time to meet to talk about your student's progress?  Check out the link below
to sign up for a time slot during our scheduled parent-teacher conference night on Wednesday, November 17th from 5pm-7pm.

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

AP Computer Science Principles - AP Exam Registration Deadline is November 8th!

AP Exam Information:

At this point, all students should be enrolled in our class through the AP Classroom platform.  This platform is a great resource for instructional videos and practice exam questions that will prepare us for the AP exam in May.

The deadline for registering for the AP exam is November 8th.  After that, students may enroll in the AP exam but there will be a $40 late fee.  Please check out the following document for information on how to sign up for the exam:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YF-fAy1T99rqGxQk9UkqIcpEqeWwFQxUVza40a6j3k4/edit?usp=sharing

APCPS: Agenda

Our time this week will be split between Activity 1.2.4: Turtle Escape and some preparation for the AP Exam.  On Monday and Thursday, students will work on Activity 1.2.4 where they will work on creating a maze program that will allow a "Turtle" object to navigate throughout a maze.  On Tuesday and Wednesday, students will spend some time viewing some videos provided by AP Classroom and completing some sample AP Exam-style questions.

App Development

This week, we will begin our third unit of the year.  We will start off this week by completing our Pre-Unit hackwich, Commission Pay.  We will then spend the rest of the week diving into our discussion of "Functions".  Students will learn how to write more efficient code by writing their own custom functions.  

Programming the Web 1

This week is our midterm.  Students will work to create a four-page website.  Students will be provided the content (images and text) and they will have the week to format it to the shown specifications.  All midterm projects are due at the end of class on Thursday.  Students will need additional time beyond our class are welcome to come in during JIT before school or during lunch.

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

 Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles - AP Exam Registration Deadline is November 8th!

AP Exam Information:

At this point, all students should be enrolled in our class through the AP Classroom platform.  This platform is a great resource for instructional videos and practice exam questions that will prepare us for the AP exam in May.

The deadline for registering for the AP exam is November 8th.  After that, students may enroll in the AP exam but there will be a $40 late fee.  Please check out the following document for information on how to sign up for the exam:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YF-fAy1T99rqGxQk9UkqIcpEqeWwFQxUVza40a6j3k4/edit?usp=sharing

APCPS: Agenda

The majority of this week will be spent on Activity 1.2.3: Apple Avalanche.  In this activity, students will work in pairs in order to learn how to apply the idea of abstraction in order to remove some of the complexity of a program, making the program easier to write and read.

App Development

This week, students will be working on their second summative app challenge for the year: Multiply.  In this project, students will work to make a simple calculator that multiplies two numbers and displays the results.  Once we get the basics down, students will add more complicated options such as displaying one of three pictures, based on the math problem result and adding additional arithmetic operations to the calculator.

Programming the Web 1

This week, students will work with the "Box Model".  Students will experiment with adding margin,
padding, and borders to our webpage in order to enhance its design.  Students will read chapter 14 in our book and complete the reading guide by Tuesday's class.  Students will also work on Web Assignment 8A: a tutorial assignment from our textbook.  The rest of the week will be spent reviewing for our midterm assignment that will take place during the week of November 8th.

What's Going On? October 25th through October 27th

 Thought for the Week

Shortened Schedule

This week, we will have a shortened schedule. Students will be released early from school on Wednesday and will not have school on Thursday and Friday.  Enjoy your break!

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will work on finishing activity 1.2.2: Catch A Turtle Leaderboard.  In this activity, students will learn how to work with multiple coding files and how to read and write to a text file in order to maintain a leaderboard for our "Catch a Turtle" game.  This assignment is due by the end of class on Wednesday.

AP Exam Information:

At this point, all students should be enrolled in our class through the AP Classroom platform.  This platform is a great resource for instructional videos and practice exam questions that will prepare us for the AP exam in May.

The deadline for registering for the AP exam is November 8th.  After that, students may enroll in the AP exam but there will be a $40 late fee.  Please check out the following document for information on how to sign up for the exam:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YF-fAy1T99rqGxQk9UkqIcpEqeWwFQxUVza40a6j3k4/edit?usp=sharing

App Development 1

We will start off this week by summarizing our learning of UITextFields via our technical blog post.  We will spend Tuesday's class investigating UIViews.  We will end the week by beginning our second summative of the year: Multiply.

Programming the Web 1

During this short week, our focus will be on wrapping up our lesson 7 web assignments.  Students will complete the three tutorial-based websites and turn them in by the end of class on Wednesday.  We will also complete our lesson 7 review questions.

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

 Thought for the Week

Parent-Teacher Conferences Wednesday

Parent-teacher conferences will take place this week on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 in the field house.  Conferences will run from 5-7pm.  Please stop by!

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will begin on our second unit of the year.  In this unit, we will dive into the concept of "abstraction".  We will also spend more time focusing on how to write and call custom functions as well as how to work with global variables.  This week, students will have two formative projects to work on.  For these projects, students will be introduced to some basic game development concepts with our "Catch a Turtle" and "Catch a Turtle Leaderboard" activities.

AP Exam Information:

At this point, all students should be enrolled in our class through the AP Classroom platform.  This platform is a great resource for instructional videos and practice exam questions that will prepare us for the AP exam in May.

The deadline for registering for the AP exam is November 8th.  After that, students may enroll in the AP exam but there will be a $40 late fee.  Please check out the following document for information on how to sign up for the exam:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YF-fAy1T99rqGxQk9UkqIcpEqeWwFQxUVza40a6j3k4/edit?usp=sharing

App Development 1

Our focus for this week in App Development will be Text Fields.  During Monday's class, students will work through our Playgroundbook reading in order to learn about and work with text fields.  We will also watch one of Wade's videos about how to work with text fields.  On Tuesday, we will do a class formative demo about the different ways to work with text fields.  We will finish off the week with our UITextField Code Challenge.  For this activity, students will have the opportunity to work on their own and with small teams to investigate how to get and use user input within text fields.

Programming the Web 1

Monday's class will be devoted to wrapping up our work on our lesson 6 web assignments.  We will complete our summative lesson 6 review questions at the beginning of class on Tuesday.  For the rest of the week, we will investigate colors and backgrounds.  Along with this lesson, students will read chapter 13 in our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide.  We will also have three tutorial-style assignments from the textbook to complete to learn about how to apply colors and backgrounds to a web page.

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

  Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will have three class days to work on their first summative of the year.  For this project, students will demonstrate their understanding of Python variables, loops, arrays, and conditionals while creating some sort of art algorithm using the Turtle platform.  This is the first of several practice "Create" tasks that students will complete in preparation for the official "Create" task that students will need to complete for submission to the AP board as part of their AP exam score.  We will wrap up the week by starting lesson 1.2 on "Abstraction".  In the first activity for this lesson, students will focus on how to write and read functions in Python.

AP Exam Information:

At this point, all students should be enrolled in our class through the AP Classroom platform.  This platform is a great resource for instructional videos and practice exam questions that will prepare us for the AP exam in May.

The deadline for registering for the AP exam is November 8th.  After that, students may enroll in the AP exam but there will be a $40 late fee.  Please check out the following document for information on how to sign up for the exam:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YF-fAy1T99rqGxQk9UkqIcpEqeWwFQxUVza40a6j3k4/edit?usp=sharing

App Development

The majority of this week will be devoted to our study of operators.  In other words, how do we get an app to do mathematical calculations?  We will spend Monday and Tuesday's classes working on the "Operators Code Challenge".  On Thursday, we will summarize what we learned through a technical blog post.  We will end the week by diving into Textfields.

Programming the Web 1

Monday's class will be devoted to wrapping up our lesson 5 web assignments and catching up on any missing assignments.  After this, we will dive into our sixth unit of study.  In this unit, students will read chapters 11 and 12 and complete our accompanying reading guide.  Along with this week, students will also have ten multiple-choice questions to answer. We will also have three tutorial-based web assignments to complete from our textbook.