AP Computer Science Principles

In this unit, students will explore the technical challenges and questions that arise from the need to represent digital information in computers. Learn how complex information like numbers, text, images, and sound is represented in text, how compression works, and the broader social impacts of digitizing the world's 

In this unit, students will learn how the Internet was designed to connect billions of devices and people to one another. Learn how the different protocols of the Internet work and actually build them yourself using the Internet Simulator. Students will then consider the impacts the Internet has had, both good and bad, on modern life.

In this unit, students will be introduced to programming and app design with a heavy focus on important skills like debugging, pair programming, and user testing. Students will learn how to design user interfaces and write event-driven programs in App Lab and then design a project that teaches their classmates about a topic of their choosing.

In this unit, students will explore how variables, conditionals, and functions allow for the design of increasingly complex apps. Students will learn how to program with these three new concepts through a sequence of collaborative activities. Students will then build their own decision maker app to share with friends and help them make a decision.

In this unit, students will learn how data analysis helps turn raw data into useful information about the world. Students will learn how to use data visualization to find patterns within data sets and learn how this data analysis process is being used in contexts like open data or machine learning to help make decisions or learn more about our world. In the unit project, they'll analyze a dataset of your choosing and present their findings.

In this unit, students will be introduced to lists, loops, and traversals, and explore the way they can be used to build apps that store and process large amounts of information. Students will learn to program with the data library in App Lab and complete a 5-day hackathon project at the end of the unit, where they can design a program about any topic of their choosing.

In this unit, students will be introduced to parameters, return, and libraries. Students will learn how to use these concepts to build new kinds of apps as well as libraries of code that you can share with your classmates. Students will end the unit by designing a library of functions around any topic of their choosing.

In this unit, students will learn how computing innovations have impacted our world in beneficial and harmful ways. Learn how data can pose a threat to our privacy and security, and the ways that encryption and other techniques are used to protect it. Throughout the unit, students will participate in a "school of the future" conference in which they and a team make a proposal for how best to improve school life with computing innovations.

In this unit, students will prepare for and do the AP Create Performance Task. Each lesson contains links to helpful documents and activities that will help students understand the task and develop a plan for completing it.

In this unit, students will explore how computer scientists design algorithms to solve problems and how they analyze the speed of different algorithms. Students will learn about the concept of algorithmic efficiency through a variety of hands-on activities and learn how it is being applied in modern computing.

In this unit, students will further explore CS topics, focused on covering areas of CS that expand student understanding and interests.