Juniors

Junior Schedule and Curriculum

Daily schedule - See Home Page

Curriculum

Your remote learning for this year will be done using two tutorial sites:

www.mycareeressentials.org

This is a skills USA tutorial that will teach you about employability skills, such as:

  • Continuous Improvement

  • Initiative

  • Collaboration

  • Customer Service

  • Change Management

  • Career Readiness

Each grade is being assigned one of the three Career essentials courses. Sophomores will be completing the Advanced Experiences course. You will receive an enrollment key and be instructed on creating an account during the first week of school. We will be doing this tutorial each Friday morning.

www.codehs.com

You will be doing the course

Course: Juniors 20-21 APCS Principles with Python

You should have an invite to this in your email. Otherwise, we will sign up together the first remote day this fall.

Yes, last year we did APCS Principles too, using Code.org. Unfortunately, due to some problems with signing up for the course, along with the sudden work at home situation, only a few of you ended up submitting work for review. I am happy to say that Jeremy, Stevie and Ryan all passed The AP Computer Science Exam! I am positive that the rest of you are capable of the same, and it is important stuff to learn, so I would like us to try again.

For those who passed last year, I would like to meet with you separately to discuss your work this year.

Your curriculum includes the entirety of the APCS Principles course. I think we should be able to move through the first half fairly quickly. I would like to keep people pretty close together this year, please don't go too far ahead, and please don't skip the exercises. You will not get credit for the work if you skip any parts of this tutorial. If you need more of a challenge, email me and let me know.

Weekly Announcements regarding what we will be covering during the week will be posted on Sunday night at the latest. Please refer to this to keep track of where you are supposed to be.

CodeHS has a wonderful progress tracking system. If you are skipping lessons, I will know. If you are going to quickly, I will know. If you haven't logged in in 5 days, well, you get the picture! I will also know WHEN you are doing a terrific job, which I know you are all capable of!

Please don't race through these lessons. If you finish early, use the sandbox to be creative and come up with your own programs, using what you have learned. I will give you extra credit for additional work done, as long as your assigned work was completely and correctly done FIRST.

The curriculum will include:

  • Unit 1 (w1-w2)

    • Commands (complete 9/28/20)

    • Functions (complete 9/28/20)

    • Top Down Design and Decomposition (complete 9/28/20)

    • Commenting your Code (complete 9/28/20)

    • Abstraction (complete 9/28/20)

    • Looping (complete 10/5/20)

    • Conditionals (complete 10/5/20)

    • Debugging (complete 10/5/20)

    • Algorithms (complete 10/5/20)

    • Preconditions and Postconditions

    • Top Down Design

  • Unit 2 (Semester 1, w3-w4)

    • Solving large and more complex problems using Karel

  • Unit 3 (Semester 1 w5)

    • Python beyond Karel

      • What is code

      • Hello World

      • Variables

      • User Input

      • Basic Math

      • Graphics

      • Mouse Events

      • Key Events

    • Unit 4 (Semester 1 weeks 6-7)

      • Booleans

      • Logical Operators

      • Comparison Operators

      • Conditionals

      • Loops

      • Random Numbers

      • More loops

    • Unit 5 - Functions and Parameters - week 8

    • Unit 6 - Data Structures - week 9 (end of semester 1)

    • Mr. McLaurin will be teaching Units 7- 14

    • Units 14-15 - Practice, Practice Practice - Semester 2 weeks 10 through 13

Plan on doing 2-3 "practice" Performance Task Projects. We will pair program and you will review each other's projects for completing the requirements of the task. We will also take a practice exam.

See the APCS Principles Exam Site for further details: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/exam

Performance Task Directions:

https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-csp-student-task-directions.pdf?course=ap-computer-science-principles