What's Going On? April 29th through May 3rd

App Development 1

This week, students will continue to work on our summative app, "Tip Calculator".  For this app,
students will create an app that can be used when going out to eat at a restaurant.  The app should calculate a 15% gratuity.  From there, students will work on formatting and design elements.  Once this is mastered, students can work on building on the app to calculate different gratuity percentages and how to split the bill among several people.

App Development 2

We will start the week by talking about elements of design.  We will look at a website called "Can't Unsee" that focuses on the different elements that show good design.  We will also investigate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.  Towards the end of the week, we will get started on the "Build Your Own App" Challenge, where students will design and implement an app of their choosing.




AP Computer Science A

At the beginning of the week, students will wrap up our final lab, "Elevens".  Once this is complete, we will move into reviewing for the AP exam.  Our AP Exam will be held on the afternoon of Friday, May 17th. 





Programming the Web 1

This week, we will work on lesson 11.  This week's lesson focuses in on how to design for multiple
layouts and how to apply the "phark technique" to ensure that all pages can have exactly one h1 tag.  We will also discuss how we can remove all of the default styles that come along with individual browsers by using the "Meyer Reset".  Along with this week, students will read a chapter from our textbook, complete the accompanying reading guide and have a summative multiple choice question assessment.  Additionally, we will have two web pages to complete.

What's Going On? April 22nd through April 26th

Aspire Testing

The rest of the week will be disrupted by "Aspire" testing.  Freshmen will be broken into two groups. Most students with the last names A-K will test in the morning Tuesday through Thursday.  Students with the last names L-Z will test in the afternoon Tuesday-Wednesday.



Spirit Week

This week, we will have a spirit week with an assembly on Friday.  Here are the dress up days:

App Development 1

This week, we will finish up our "Gesture Recognizer Demo" to show how we can use tap gestures and pan gestures to interact with our app.  Once this is complete, we will participate in our formative hackwich "Fizz Buzz" in order to practice conditionals and interacting with results calculated in our app.  This will set us up for our end-of-unit-app-challenge, "Tip Calculator". 

App Development 2

This week, students will be working on our last teacher-directed app for the year.  Students will be creating the classic "Breakout" game where a ball bounces off a paddle in order to "break" a block barrier.  Students will be using SpriteKit to create the game and use Physics to define interactions in the game world.

AP Computer Science A

This week, students will work on finishing up our programming project #9 and our summative lab, "Elevens".  Students will have their summative assessment for unit 9 toward the end of this week.  For this unit, students should be prepared to demonstrate their knowledge of recursion, searching, and sorting.

Programming the Web 1

We will start off the week by completing our unit 9 multiple choice review questions.  After this, we will dive into unit 10 where we will talk about negative margins and how to rearrange the look of our page strictly through the CSS file.  Along with this week, students will have our chapter reading, the reading guide, our lesson 10 review questions, and our web assignment 10A and 10B.  Students who need additional lab time are invited to come in before school to get caught up.

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

App Development 1

This week, we will continue our study of functions.  Students will start off the week by finishing up our formative "Functions Challenge".  We will also see a multiple choice quiz so we can make sure we have a firm foundation of what is happening when we define and use functions.  Once we have wrapped up our "Functions Challenge", we will dive into conditional statements.  That is, how to determine if a variable meets certain requirements.  While talking about conditionals, we will discuss if...else statements and switch statements.



App Development 2

This week, we will continue our study of Sprite Kit while we create our "Ninja Hiya!" game.  For this game, we will learn how to add sprites, or characters, to our game.  We will also learn how to create animation so that our "enemies" are coming from random places and have random behavior.  Time permitting, we will also investigate some physics in order to detect collisions.


AP Computer Science A

This week, we will talk about searching algorithms.  Specifically, we will focus on linear search and binary search.  We will also analyze the efficiency of both algorithms.  Students will also complete practice exercise set #3 and review exercise set #3 in order to work with these searching techniques.  Once this is complete, students will begin work on our summative programming project #9.

Programming the Web

This week is Midterm week!  There will be two parts to this midterm exam: a 20 question multiple

choice test and a web site.  For the multiple choice questions, students will be working from the pool of the 80 multiple choice questions that we have seen so far this semester.  For this assessment, students will not be permitted to use any resources.  For the web site creation, students will have all class periods this week to work to duplicate our the website.  For this portion, students may use old assignments, our textbook, and Google in order to complete the assignment.  All websites must be uploaded by the end of class on Friday.

End of the Year Schedule

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!

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

App Development 1

This week in App Development 1, we will start to learn about operators.  That is, how we can perform math operations.  We will try out our new skills together as a class in a Playground.  Students will also have the chance to work individually on our "Operators" Challenge.  We will finish up the week with an operators quiz on BlackBoard and our pre-summative hackwich, "display a number".

App Development 2

We will spend Monday's class wrapping up our first summative app of the semester, Assignment how prevent user error from crashing our app.  Once we finish talking about some of these safeguards, we will move into how we can present segues "modally".  That is, how to pause our app's functionality to visit another screen. 
Notebook.  Once this is complete, we will move into our second unit of the semester.  We will talk about




AP Computer Science A

This week, we will spend Monday's class finish up our group discussions on unit 8.  Students will
then have the remainder of the week to work on programming project #8.  In this project, students will implement their knowledge learned about defining efficient classes, how to use inheritance and how to implement interfaces.




Programming the Web 1

During this week's lesson, we will finally use the industry-standard software, DreamWeaver.  Along with this software, students will learn about images.  We will learn how to add images, specify their size, how to turn an image into a link and how to create an image map.  Along with this week, students will read chapter 6, complete the accompanying reading guide, and ten multiple-choice review questions.  We will also have three assignments to complete: adding links as images to a travel site, creating an company website with an image map, and our final modification of our personal website where we add pictures to each page.