The Computer Science department at Lincoln Sudbury held its second annual Computer Science Exhibition on Monday, May 20 2019 in the LS Cafeteria. Students from the AP Computer Science Principles and the Java Programming classes showed off their final projects. Prizes were awarded in several categories: Visual Design, Technical Excellence, and Problem Solving.
The first Computer Science Showcase at Lincoln Sudbury was held last night in the LS Cafeteria. Students working alone or in pairs showed off twenty five final projects, which were viewed by parents, staff and community members. Their projects were assessed by four judges, three of whom were LS alumni and one a local developer. … Read more
This year, I’m teaching AP Computer Science Principles for the first time, using Harvard’s CS50 curriculum. One of the CS50 assignments is called Fifteen, and in this assignment students program the computer to play a digital version of the game with fifteen little numbered plastic tiles on a four by four grid, with one space … Read more
I finally finished (after 18 months) the CS50 EdX course. I started it when I decided to use much of its contents in teaching my AP Computer Science Principles course at Lincoln Sudbury. It was hard to find time to finish all the projects – the “Speller” one was the hardest for me, but I have … Read more
In 1999 I taught my first programming course. I used a programming environment called Microworlds Logo, and my curriculum was on a floppy disk full of Word documents written by the teacher who taught the class the previous year. This year, I’m teaching a new course. The AP Computer Science Principles course has links to … Read more
I spent the past week in Kansas City, Missouri reading the AP Computer Science Principles exam. “Reading” is a euphemism for “grading”, and I graded somewhere between 300 and 400 student responses over the past week. I’ll write here about my experience grading the exams, but won’t get specific about the exam responses I read … Read more
For several years I’ve been following news of the College Board creating a new Computer Science course, called AP CS Principles. It sounds like a great course outline, with algorithmic thinking and creativity emphasized over pure programming exercises. While the curriculum does require some programming, it is language agnostic and some of the first and … Read more