CS Standards

There are six over-arching Computational Thinking Practices that are broken down into skills for ease of application across the AP Computer Science Principles. The number refers to which of the six practices the skill falls under, and the letter refers to an individual skill within the practice.

For example, 1.C is the third listed skill under the first practice.

The same format is used to refer to these skills at the beginning of each unit in this curriculum. The six Computational Thinking Practices are summarized on the following link / button.

There are five over-arching Big Ideas that serve as cross-cutting themes to provide deeper understanding of the concepts throughout the course. They are broken down in to digestible teaching chunks called Topics.

The Topics refer to Big Ideas by number, where the number before the decimal is the Big Idea and the number after the decimal is the Topic within the Big Idea.

For example, 2.10 is the tenth Topic in the second Big Idea.

This curriculum does not refer to Topics often, but the reference will follow this format when it does so teachers may look through the College Board AP CSP Course and Exam Description for more information. The five Big Ideas are summarized at the following link / button.

Course content is specified in three ways:

1. Enduring Understanding - sub category of Big Idea

2. Learning Objective - subcategory of Enduring Understanding

3. Essential Knowledge - subcategory of Learning Objective

The meaning of these three titles are not important, but understand how they are subcategories of each other.

While Topics refer to the Big Ideas by number, Course Content refers to the Big Ideas by acronym. Reference numbers and reference acronyms are unique to each Big Idea, however, Topics and Course Content use different labeling systems because they are not fully correlated.

The labeling system for Course Content seems complex at first glance, but it is a system that gets more specific as numbers/letters are added to the end. Using the CollegeBoard AP CSP vocabulary:

• Big Ideas are referred to by acronym,

• the first number after the dash is the Enduring Understanding,

• the letter after that is the Learning Objective,

• the last number is the Essential Knowledge.

An example from the CollegeBoard APCSP is provided as a graphic below.