Sunday, September 7, 2014

Teaching AP CompSci: Quarter I Week 1 First Week Back!

Teaching AP CompSci:
Quarter I Week 1 First Week Back!
I don't usually do a day by day rundown of the week, but here goes nothing!

MONDAY: Labor Day (nothing to report)

TUESDAY: Superintendent's Conferences where we spent all day in meetings except for the last 2 hours of the day when we finally got to set up our rooms. I spent those 2 hours moving 100 textbooks, arranging and tweeking 25 PCs, finding 25 chairs and placing 6 tables. Then I found that my SSH server's RAID drive crashed, so I had to setup openSSH on an alternate server I used to have for FTP. That's OK since I don't need the FTP server much anymore. I use the SSH sever for my AP Computer Science students to login from home and finish their Java projects. I share files with my students through Edmodo. I upload my files on DropBox, SageCell and YouTube aka my cloud!

WEDNESDAY: First Day of Classes
The first day of every quarter starts with the "Ceremony Of The Seats" (new seating assignments). The students come into a dark room except for the PC monitors and the SmartBoard. On the SmartBoard I'm playing an MP3 of the sound track to "A Beautiful Mind" over VLC. Since this isn't an MP4, VLC adds some wild special effects on the SmartBoard so it's all cool. Then I walk to each seat and call each student using my SmartPhone as a flashlight as if I'm an usher in the Movie Theater. It's all very dramatic. Then we hand out books and book cards, go over the syllabus and fill out some biographical forms. Sorry, there's no instruction the first day of classes.
YOUTUBE: Since it was Wednesday, after all, I had to show a FILK or two! So, at the end of the period I snuck in our own student made Frozen and then the infamous Mathmaticious!

THURSDAY: Hello World Version #1
Of course, I had to start with Hello World! This version simply uses println for output. The next version will add args[0] commandline input! We are using a basic Linux Shell or Terminal with a text or ASCII Editor along with jdk 1.6's java and javac utilities. I'll introduce appletviewer next week and javadoc in chapter 3 when we write our own classes.

FRIDAY: Pop Goes the Quzzie!
I know it's only the 3rd day of class. However, I did throw a lot of acronyms and jargon at my students already, so here's the quiz. I hope you know all the answers. Let me just do these fill-ins for you:

PARTC: MrG has been teaching
1010) PROGRAMMING since 1975
1011) NYS REGENTS MATH & SCI since 1984
1100) COLLEGE MATH & COMP since 1993
1101) LINUX CLUSTERS since 2002
1110) COMP ALG SYSTEMS since 2011
1111) IDK! since 2020
APCS: AP CompSci + JAVA SCREENCASTS: 
YouTube descriptions include links to code and notes if you need them.

Teaching AP CompSci: 
APCS NEW LAB DEBATE!
Quarter I Week 0 August Preparation
I started getting ready for the new AP Computer Science 20 hour lab requirement that's replacing the GridWorld Case Study using the 3 New Labs some time ago. If I recall correctly, all I had to do was goto the secure documents area of the APCommunity Teacher Audit site and download 3 zip files. Before downloading said files I had to click on some sort of acknowledgement pop up about using these labs or similar labs of my own design as part of the 20 hour requirement, that these files are indeed secure (ie: not to be posted publically) and that GridWorld is gone!

If that's all you think that you have to do for your students, I'd say that you're missing the point! The new requirement is to have at least 20 hours of lab time as part of your course. I don't think that's going to be a problem for most of us currently teaching APCS as I'm sure we probably provide more than 20 hours of lab time already. I know that I have lab time as part of every single class (that's why I teach in a PC Lab/Classroom). In 150 classes before AP Review and AP Exam Week, I probably have 100 hours of lab time! I can go many classes in a row without any formal lecture if we are in the throws of a particularly challenging problem set. I usually do a brief lecture at the beginning of a chapter. Then I give the students a pdf of the chapter to study at home privately via Edmodo or DropBox. Then I give my students a problem set for the chapter to hash out "together" (ie: in pairs but I help out at each PC or at the SmartBoard).

Now, if the 20 hours really means 20x60 minutes and not 20 periods, then the new requirement is more like 30 periods if your periods are 40 minutes long. So, if you did the New Labs all in a row, we're talking, for example, all of January and most of February.

When I heard of the demise of GridWorld, I was very happy as I could finally go back to using my own smaller "case studies" or projects that I never had time to do since the advent of College Board imposed Case Studies. I would only be able to do 1 or 2 of my own projects and varied them each year. I guess I'm a throw back to the time before AP Case Studies. Yes, there was such a time, and I enjoyed teaching that way.

Now the problem is to be able to cover the same material presented in the New Labs in those 20 hours. I was going to do my own thing or even just stick to GridWorld for a while. But now that I see the labs, I think my students may well enjoy this approach. I'll probably do a mix of a few of my own projects with the New Labs and the old problem sets from our textbook.

I've read the articles on http://www.skylit.com (Maria and Gary Litvin) as well as on http://www.bluepelicanjava.com (Charles Cook) regarding the use of the 3 Labs. Gary makes the case that the New Labs will take too much class time to cover thoroughly. Charles talks about reorganizing the labs into 17-23 hours of class time to cover them all. BluePelicanJava includes a lot of APCS B aka CS II, so I guess we can cut some of that! I was originally 100% with Gary, but now I think I'm somewhere between the two. 

http://www.apluscompsci.com (Stacey Armstrong) even has a College Board approved syllabus with the New Labs integrated throughout the year. So, I guess she's on board too.

I haven't heard much from Cay Horstmann, or anyone else for that mater, on this subject.

You know, when we used to teach C++ in AP Computer Science, I used Gary Litvin's C++ for You++ as well as Owen Astrachan's Tapestry. Both of these C++ texts were masterpieces in my opinion! 

Now, I use Gary's "MP3: Mathematics for the Digital Age and Programming in Python 3.0" in my intro CS class and Cay's Big Java in APCS A aka CS I. I wonder what Owen has to say about the New Labs. He's probably too busy developing the new AP CS Principles course to weigh in on this. BTW, these two texts are masterworks as well! Keep up the good work!

Am I going to be able to fit in every single exercise from all 3 Labs the first year? Probably not, but I think I'll try to fit as much in as I can. As with everything else, it comes down to experience. WRT to the 3 Labs we are all NOOBS again, so this year we can do justice to some of the Labs, next year a bit more, then eventually we'll get it down. 

On a related note, if I had decided NOT to use the New Labs and substitute my own projects covering the same concepts, would I have had to resubmit my APCS Syllabus for audit? I was never clear on this point. I suppose it's moot now as I'm using the New Labs.
If you want ideas for your own projects, I like to use the StdDraw class from Princeton CS 126. I've also used How To Think Like A Computer Scientist in my intro course using Python. Some of the projects in there could easily be done with Java. Here's some nice lab ideas from the awesome Roger Frank!

Given enough time (obviously can't do all this but I wish I could), here's what I'm thinking:
CH1: Hello World 
(main, println, basic IO)
CH2: Using Objects 
(from existing classes)
CH3: Implementing Classes 
(our own constructors, accessors, mutators)
CH4: Fundamental Data Types
(Objects vs Primitives)
CH6: Decisions 
(if statements, boolean expressions)
CH7: Iteration
(for loops, while loops, for each loops)

**MAGPIE LAB**

PROJECT: RockPaperScissorsLizardSpock (IF)
PROJECT: ROT13 Encryption (Strings)
PROJECT: Lindenmayer Systems (Strings)
PROJECT: Pythagorean Triples (Loops)
PROJECT: Function Graphing Calculator
PROJECT: Parametric Graphing Calculator
PROJECT: Polar Graphing Calculator

CH8: Arrays and ArrayLists
(1D and 2D static arrays, Lists)

**PICTURE LAB** skip optionals

PROJECT: Polygons and ShoeLace
PROJECT: Iterated Fractal Systems
PROJECT: Number Base Conversions
PROJECT: Roman Numeral Arithmentic
PROJECT: Chess960 and Random Numbers
PROJECT: Complex and Mandelbrot

CH11: Interfaces and Polymorphism
CH13: Inheritance

**ELEVENS LAB** skip optionals except sim

CH18: Recursion
CH19: Sorting and Searching
PROJECT: Turtle Class
PROJECT: Turtle Class+Lindenmayer
PROJECT: Turtle Class+Koch SnowFlakes
PROJECT: Turtle Class+Ball/Ballistics
PROJECT: Turtle Class+nBody/Orbits
PROJECT: Our own Static Math Class

AP REVIEW
AP EXAMS
POST AP EXAMS:
Linux Clusters, MPI4PY
Python, VPython, Cython
SAGE, POVRAY, BLENDER, TACHYON

Python Samples to convert to Java projects:



Java Samples:







VPython Sample:


SAGE Samples: 
(4 video playlist)


Clusters and Scientific Computing Samples:
(6 video playlist)


Well, that's all folks!
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