Curriculum Overview

The SCC AP CSP curriculum is broken into two semesters. Semester 1 contains Units 1-5, and semester 2 contains Units 6-9.

Semester 1

Unit 1: Computing Innovation Selection & Impact

Students are introduced to the course and asked to think about a computing innovation that has personal meaning and relevance to their world. Teams of two are formed to begin research on the topic and industry and begin a website on their innovation. Students are introduced to AGILE project management methodology and begin exam practice as they will do both in all units throughout the course.

Unit 2: Computer Systems and Networks

Students learn about computer systems and networks by developing a case study around the company that produces their innovation. They design a digital media artifact, in the form of their own choice, that could be used to recruit for the company. They add this artifact to the website.

Unit 3: Safe Computing

Student groups investigate and analyze the security of the innovation as it relates to privacy, legal, and ethical issues. Students choose a law or act related to the innovation and create a digital Public Service Announcement (PSA) on the law/act, its history, and its impact for different groups of people. The PSA is added to the website.

Unit 4 & 5: Data Representation & Big Data

Students role play responding to an industry concern related to the computing innovation topic in respect to its data collection, representation, and security. They also learn to design, filter, clean and analyzed collected data on their topic. Students will visually present findings and interpretations of the data as well as address concerns that arise with the collection of their data (privacy, storage, security).

Semester 2

Unit 6: Programming Foundations

Students begin to individually code in Javascript using EarSketch to make a short musical introduction based on music and mood research. They can choose to continue with their previous innovation or another client organization such as a student organization or school partner. Students are also introduced to the AP exam agnostic language and respond to summative multiple-choice questions as they have throughout the course.

Unit 7: Control Algorithms & Procedural Abstraction

Student pairs collaboratively design a musical background for a one-minute TikTok or other visual inspiration where students make their own computationally looped beats that have conditional fills much like a DJ. Students’ songs require them to create procedures to apply musical form. Student pairs provide feedback as they have done throughout the course as they iterate on their Javascript musical compositions.

Unit 8: Event Driven Programming & Data Abstraction

Student pairs use other groups music from the previous unit in combination with their own music to create a jukebox of songs that play a user’s selection or computationally randomly selects the song. Students use data structures to develop the event centered and random selection of the jukebox while continuing the previous computational concepts of iteration, conditionals, and procedure creation for the songs of the jukebox. Feedback is again provided as well as continued transfer of Javascript into the AP exam agnostic language.

Unit 9: AP Exam Practice

Students practice the requirements of the Create Task through the jukebox project and analyze each other’s practice submission based on criteria that are similar to the AP Exam Task. Practice multiple choice exams are also continued as they have been throughout the semester.

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