Arlington Tech

Arlington Tech

AP Computer Science Principles


Overview

We will begin the week by discussing the wonderful work you did on your first practice CPT programs, and then move on to a systematic study of the 5 Big Ideas about which questions are asked on the multiple choice part of the exam.

Thursday, December 1st

Classwork / Homework

As I suspected, milage on the robots.py varied widely, with some students well on their way toward finishing the program, and others struggling to really get started.

That was to be expected, since as I've been saying all year, our prior programming experience varied widely when we arrived in this class. My task is now to differentiat the next assignment, so everyone learns, and everyone grows their skills through this programming project.

Reflecting on your experience thus far, place yourself into one of two groups:

  1. I'm just getting started with robots.py.
  2. I'm nearly finished with robots.py.

If you are in the first group, you will continue working on robots.py for the last hour of class and for homework. If you are in the second group, your last hour and homework assignment will be Chomp.

The following students earned full credit on their homework: Gabriel, Anupama, Jack, Kellan, Alex, Noah, Emory, Rockwell, Blu, Toby, Evan, Christian, Lary, Conrad, Kiersten, Grant, Jake, and Ronan.

Actually, only Jake seems to be anywhere near finished, with Toby, Gabriel Evan, and Jack having made significant progress.

Tuesday, November 29th

The work we did as a class on your first CPT practice was excellent. We are well on your way towards success on the AP CSP exam. That said, there are still several lessons we can learn from our first experience that will help us assure we get where we need to be by next May, and improve our programming skills in general. Reflecting on our CPT practice provides a great opportunity to refine our skills.

Classwork / Lessons

Some specific observations that from your submissions that will be useful to you all going forward include:

  • The video submission of your program should not include sound and should generally not show code. The purpose of the video is to show the programming running, focusing on its input and output.
  • When working on your program source, keep in mind the importance of readability and the KISS principle mentioned earlier. The Style Guide for Python Code is a great resource for addressing readability, and we will discuss that more in class.
  • Python provides excellent resources for reading data from text files. Putting the data in a seperate file that way makes it possible for content people to edit data without having to be programmers. We'll see several examples of this in class.

Homework

In order extend your available resources for creating programs in Python using a GUI, for homework today you will complete (or at least spend 90 minutes working on) The Robots are Coming!.

You will need to confirm that you have GASP installed before you can do that. We'll confirm during class.

To earn on this evaluation, you should have a file in your git repo named robots.py together with a series of commits showing 90 minutes of work on the program.

This assignment is due Wednesday, November 30 at 12:55 pm.