What's Going On? October 31st through November 4th

Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

Don't forget to register for the AP exam!  You must register by November 8th in order to avoid a late fee. 
Please click here to learn more about the registration process and how you can earn college credit.

We will start off this week by wrapping up Activity 1.2.2: Catch a Turtle Leaderboard.  Students continue to manage multiple files and learn to read and write to an external text file in order to maintain permanent memory storage to keep track of the best performances in our "Catch a Turtle" game.

Once this is complete, we will move into our next project: Activity 1.2.3: Apple Avalanche.  In this project, students will continue working with a game-like environment and explore how to trigger events with a key press.  Students will create several "turtle" or "apple" objects, add a letter to the object, and make the apple fall from the tree by pressing the corresponding letter.  Students will work with images, events, manage lists, and continue to write and call custom functions.

App Development 

This week, students will focus on the end-of-summative app challenge called "Multiply".  Students will
focus more on the design of their app this time around to make sure that their elements are precisely labeled and intentionally placed.  Students will then work on creating a simple calculator app and incorporate some fun images along the way.

Programming the Web 1

We will start off this week by wrapping up our lesson 8 material on "The Box Model".  In this unit, we talked about how to add specific spacing via margin and padding to our pages.  Additionally, we spent some time looking at border properties.  Students will wrap up their 8A project during class on Monday and complete our weekly multiple-choice questions on Tuesday.  We will spend the rest of Tuesday's class reviewing for our midterm project.  For our midterm project, students will have four class days to create a website demonstrating their knowledge of adding HTML elements, links, structure tags, and style.  Students will be expected to complete all work for the project by the end of class on Tuesday, November 8th.  Students who need additional time to complete the project can request to be assigned to my JIT group on Wednesday-Friday of this week.  Additionally, students can work in the lab before school.

What's Going On? October 24th through October 26th

Thought for the Week

Modified Schedule

AP Computer Science Principles

Don't forget to register for the AP exam!  You must register by November 8th in order to avoid a late fee. 
Please click here to learn more about the registration process and how you can earn college credit.

In class this week, students will continue to work on our Activity 1.2.2: Catch a Turtle Leaderboard.  Students will start to manage multiple files and learn to read and write to an external text file in order to maintain permanent memory storage to keep track of the best performances in our "Catch a Turtle" game.

App Development

During our class on Monday, students will spend a little bit of time investigating UIViews.  The idea of this UIView is to keep track of several objects together as a unit.  We can then learn to manage our views and place them in a specific order within our storyboard.  Once we have wrapped up this concept, students will begin working on our second end-of-unit app challenge, Multiply.  For this summative project, students will work on making a simple calculator that allows a user to enter in two numbers and perform some mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, mod).  

Programming the Web 1

This week, students will learn about the "Box Model" in our lesson 8 content.  Students will learn how to have tighter control of spacing and learn how to better arrange elements within our pages.  Along with this lesson, students will read chapters 7 and 10 in our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide.  Students will also complete 10 multiple choice questions to review our concepts and one book tutorial-based web project.

What's Going On? October 17th through October 21st

 Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

We will start off this week by diving into our second unit of the year on "abstraction".  Our first project, Activity 1.2.1: Catch a Turtle, we will be creating a simple game where a circle appears on the screen.  We will work with events to determine when the circle has been clicked.  Then we will then code, using functions, to move the circle to a new place and start the process again.  This project will introduce us to writing our own functions (procedures), global variables, and more.  At the end of the week, we will add on to our project to keep track of the leading scorers of the game.

App Development

The focus of this week will be TextFields.  During Monday's class, we will finish up our "Hackwich" where we will practice working with textfields in three different ways: as an outlet, as an action, and as a delegate.  For the rest of the week, students will put what we have learned into practice by completing our TextField Code Challenge and writing a technical blog post about how to effectively use TextFields within our programs.

Programming for the Web 1

During Monday's class, students will wrap up our 6th lesson of the year.  Students will start the class by completing our multiple choice questions and will have the rest of the class to finish up 6A: Your First Style Sheet, 6B: Black Goose Bistro part 1, and 6C: Black Goose Bistro part 2.  During the rest of the week, we will focus on how to use color and background images to enhance our pages.  Along with lesson 7, students will read chapter 13 from our textbook and complete the accompanying reading guide.  Students will complete three web assignments to practice adding a variety of colors and images to our pages.  We will end the lesson with our multiple choice questions.

What's Going On? October 10th through October 14th

Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

We will start off this week by wrapping up Activity 1.1.8: Turtles in Traffic.  Through this activity,
students will work with lists and conditionals in order to get a series of our "turtle" graphics to move across the screen.  Within the program, we will learn how to detect a "collision".

After this, we will move on to our first summative assignment for the year.  For this project, students will implement variables, lists, and conditionals in order to create some sort of "Turtle Art".  Students will also write responses about how their code works.  This is in preparation for our AP "Create" Performance task that will be submitted to the AP Board as part of our AP exam score.

App Development

This week, we will dive into two different topics: "Operators" and "TextFields".  We will start off the
week by experimenting with some different math operations that we can perform within the Swift programming language.  Later in the week, we will implement the use of textfields so that we can get some input from the user in order to perform calculations "on demand".  

Programming the Web 1

We will start off this week by wrapping up Unit 5 on Images and Image Maps.  Students will start
Monday's class by completing our lesson review questions and will then have the rest of the class period to finish up Web Assignments 5A (Black Goose Bistro Gallery) and 5B (Allco Service Locations).  After this, we will move into our sixth unit of the year where we will learn how to define style with CSS.  In this unit, students will learn how to apply background colors, modify text, and much more.

What's Going On? October 3rd through October 7th

 Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

We will start off this week by learning about lists and how we can use a for loop to help us iterate more efficiently through a list.  We will work within Activity 1.1.7 to create lists of turtle objects.  We will use a for loop that works with each object in our list and modifies it to create a drawing.  In Activity 1.1.8, students will be introduced to decision-making structures.  Students will play with the if...elif...else structure in order to make decisions during the run time of our code.

App Development

This week, we will start our second unit of the year.  Students will start off Monday's class with a pre-unit hackwich called "Display a Number".  We will then spend some time talking about design choices that we can make when creating our app and why we are able to so easily navigate through a new app that we can download from the Apple App Store.  We will finish the week by learning about operators (math) and how they can be used to enhance our program.

Programming the Web 1

We will start off this week by wrapping up unit 4, where we learned how to create links within our websites.  Next, we will talk about how we can add images and image maps within our sites. This marks the week that we will switch over to the program "DreamWeaver".  This is an industry-standard program that professional web designers use in order to create robust web sites.

What's Going On? September 26th through September 30th

 Thought for the Week

It's Homecoming Week!

Join in the fun and participate in some of the activities going on this week as we celebrate all things North!

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, students will continue working with looping structures and variables.  We will also take a closer look at the types of errors that we will encounter while writing computer programs.  We will wrap up the week by examing variables and practice some AP-style multiple choice questions that we might encounter during our AP exam in May.

App Development

This week, students will participate in our first summative end-of-unit app challenge.  This summative is called "Hello World".  Within this app, students will demonstrate their ability to add elements to our storyboard and make connections to our code.  Students will also have the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to work with basic variables within their program.

Programming the Web 1

We will start off this week by wrapping up lesson 3 web assignments that include 3A: Lists and 3B: Black Goose Blog.  After this, students will start learning about how to add links to their web pages.  We will learn how to link to other sites as well as how to link within our own site.  Along with this week, students will read chapter 6 in our textbook while completing the accompanying reading guide (due Wednesday).  Students will have two web assignments to complete throughout the week.  In assignment 4A, students will add a series of links to an existing site for "Jen's Kitchen".  In assignment 4B, students will work with a glossary page and demonstrate their ability to add links within a single page.

What's Going On? September 19th through September 23rd

Thought for the Week

AP Computer Science Principles

This week, we will start off the week by viewing two videos on Collaboration put together by the AP board.  We will then complete some sample AP-style multiple choice questions to prepare for questions on collaboration that may appear on May's exam.  For the rest of the week, we will focus on looping our code and adding in conditional statements.  Through Activities 1.1.4. (Spinning Spirographs) and 1.1.6 (Buggy Image), students will continue to practice writing basic Python programs using the Turtle class.  We will also begin talking about the types of errors that we will encounter as we program and some resources to help us fix them.

App Development

This week, we will focus on how to use variables and constants to store and access information in our apps.  Will learn about four major data types (integers, doubles, Strings, and Boolean) and the type of information that can be saved with them.  Along will this week, students will participate in a demo, complete a code challenge, and summarize their learning through our second technical blog post.

Programming the Web 1

This week, we will dive into our third unit of the semester.  In this unit, students will learn some additional HTML tags that we will use to mark up our text.  Students will learn how to make three different types of lists, add in quotes, and other structural tags.  Along with this week, students will read chapter 5 in our textbook while completing the accompanying reading guide (due Wednesday).  Students will have two web assignments to complete, and we will end the week by completing our lesson 3 review questions.