AP Computer Science Principles

Taking this course as prescribed provides students with:

AP Rigor
College and Career Readiness Electives
Extra Science course on transcripts
Count for High School and College credit
Ability to build apps, games, quizzes, interactive worlds and 3D applications
Skills in code.org, merge cube, and classVR sets.

Concentrator Course: (First Year Course) AP Computer Science Principles

The College Board Advanced Placement Program Computer Science "Principles" provides and extra "D" Science course for student on transcripts. This provides extra courses for Colleges acceptance and Career certification. A-G Requirements - "D" Science 2 years required, 3 years recommended, this course could be a Fourth / Fifth course on transcripts.

To stay up to date on this course, check out the College Board’s website on AP CSP.

Course and Exam Description

What will I learn in AP Computer Science Principles?

The curriculum structure of AP CSP is based around computational thinking practices, how to use simple math concepts to solve problems.

The course is broken into five main units:

- Connecting computing (learning the effects computing/programs have on society),
- Creating computational artifacts (applying computing techniques to creatively solve problems),
- Abstracting (understand how data, information, or knowledge is used for computational use),
- Analyzing problems and artifacts (evaluate a proposed solution to a problem and locate/correct errors),
- Communicating (describe computations and explain the meaning of a program’s result/output),
- Collaborating (work with others constructively to solve a computational problem).

The ability to develop simple programs and being able to explain how a program works using accurate terms to another person.

The course from collegeboard and exam is not specific to one language, rather a psuedo code. Programming languages the College Board recommend teachers use in class include Scratch, App Inventor, Python, Java, and Swift. The Teacher will move on form "block-based" to “text-based” language where you will take the building blocks you learned before but actually type code following the proper syntax or programming language rules. Java script and Python are used.

What will the AP exam for this course consist of?

AP CSP is somewhat of an unusual AP course, since there are three portions that count for different percentages of your AP score: the Explore Performance Task (16%), the Create Performance Task (24%), and the End-of Course Exam in May (60%).

The end-of-course exam is two hours long and includes 74 multiple-choice questions that test your understanding of fundamental programming ideas as well as ability to fix an error or determine/explain the outcome of a presented program.

The Explore and Create tasks are projects you will have time to work on inside and outside of class. The Explore Performance task requires you to find an innovation/technology in society and write a report on the impact it has. The Create Performance task is a project where you will be developing a program using any block-based or text-based platform taught in class while making use of a few fundamental programming ideas. You will also be submitting a written response and video about your program and development process.