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.

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

 Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science A

At the beginning of this week, we will focus on Activity 1.1.8: Turtles in Traffic.  In this activity, we will take a closer look at conditional statements. At the end of the week, we will turn our attention to our first summative activity.  For this summative, students will apply their knowledge of arrays, conditionals, loops, and the turtle environment to create a piece of art.

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

This week, we will move into our second unit of the year.  We will start off the week by working on our "Display a Number" hackwich.  In this intro app, we will learn how to work with textfields.  As the week moves on, we will talk about the design philosophy of Apple, talk about algorithmic thinking, as well as talk about how the Swift language handles operators.

Programming the Web 1

We will spend Monday's class wrapping up our fourth unit on links.  Next, we will move into our fifth unit on Image Maps and Images.  Starting with this unit, we will be working with the industry-standard program DreamWeaver.  Students will complete their reading guides by Wednesday and complete a ten-question multiple-choice test on Thursday.  Along with this week, students will complete two web assignments: the  Black Goose Gallery and the Allco Image Map.

What's Going On? September 27th through October 1st

 Thought for the Week

Freshmen MAP Testing This Week

This week, freshmen will participate in our first MAP test for the year.  On Tuesday morning, students will complete the English portion of the test.  On Wednesday afternoon (after lunch), students will complete the Math portion of the test.

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will be using the Python language to learn about 'for' loops and conditionals.  Along with
this week, students will work through activities 1.1.7 and 1.1.8 from the PLTW website.  Through these activities, we will learn about how to store and manage multiple pieces of data from a list.  We will also learn how to implement conditional statements (if...else) in order to make decisions in our code.  What we will learn this week will teach us how to alter the "flow of control" within a program.  In other words, we don't have to execute all lines of our code sequentially.

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 working on our first summative end-of-unit app challenge called "Hello World".  In this app, students will demonstrate their ability to add labels, buttons, and other items to their project.  Students will have the opportunity to demonstrate this through the storyboard and through the code.  Once we have wrapped up this project, we will move into our second unit of the year.  We will start off the unit with a pre-unit hackwich called "Display a Number".  This activity will introduce students to wokring with textfields.

Programming the Web 1

This week, our attention will be focused on how to add different types of links to our website.  We will learn how to link to an external page (like Google), to another page that we have created, as well as how to link within our page (called "linking to a fragment").  Additionally, we will talk about how we might include an email link and the advantages and disadvantages of placing this link on a website.  

With this unit, students will read chapter 6 in our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide.  We will also have two web assignments to complete. These assignments include 4a: "Jen's Kitchen" and 4b: "Linking to a Fragment".  We will end the week with our ten multiple choice questions.

It's Homecoming Week!

Check out the dress-up days and our schedule for Friday.

Need Extra Help?

I am available Monday-Thursday before school and during our lunchtime JIT.  Please see me in room 300. I would be happy to help!

Waukesha North Computer Science: What's Going On? September 20th through September 24th

Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, our focus will be on wrapping up Activity 1.1.5, Run, Robot, Run.  In this activity, students will learn how to use commands and functions in order to get a "robot" to follow the path of a maze until it reaches its destination.  Once this is complete, we will turn our attention to completing Activity 1.1.6, Buggy Image.  In this activity, students will learn how to locate and fix errors in our code.  Students will also gain some practice assigning variables and working with arithmetic expressions.

App Development

This week, we will spend the majority of our time digging in deeper with variables, constants, and data types.  Students will complete a worksheet and work on a variables code challenge to become familiar with how to use variables.  Students will summarize their learning through our second technical blog post.  We will end the week by beginning our first summative end-of-unit app challenge, Hello World.  

Programming for the Web 1

This week, we will focus in on our third unit of the year.  Our focus is on additional HTML markup, including lists, address tags, and how to mark up specific sections of our page.  Along with this week, students should read chapter 5 in our textbook while completing the lesson 3 reading guide (due Tuesday).  Students will have two web assignments to complete: one that focuses on lists and another that focuses on how to mark up specific sections of our page.  We will wrap up the lesson by completing our ten multiple-choice questions.