Teaching AP CS

Technology night 08

Brian Scarbeau — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:52:43 GMT

Tech night 08 was a great success last night in the Lakefront room at LHPS. There were close to 50 students and parents in attendance to listen to Andrea Barr from Apple who talked about Podcasting. Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel talked about Tech Tips for students. Richard Connor from Laptop Plus dove into pc security and finally Dan Waters from Microsoft talked about the tablet pc and Onenote software. Lots of information in two hours time. Thanks to Microsoft for the donation of an XBOX and to the Orlando Sentinel for some give away prizes.

Here's the tech guru from the Orlando Sentinel talking about tech tips for students.

Richard Connor from Laptop Plus talking about computer security.

Technorati Tags: computer science education, xbox, orlando Sentinel, pc security, apple, podcasting

Have you heard of JING?

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:39:40 GMT

According to TechSmith, JING is a project and not a product. Whatever they want to call it, JING is an excellent communication tool where you can capture a screen, add your voice and voila you have yourself a movie file to share with anyone. In education, this is great. For example, I can use this on any of my powerpoint slides or software demos that I use in class and put them on my website for students to view as a review. What's even better is that you save on 200 MB of space provided to you by screencast.com. That way you can either create a link to your movie file or you can create embedded code and place that on your web page.

This runs on a mac or PC. Here are the requirements.

Windows XP & Vista
Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0
Flash Player 6 or higher
8MB of free hard drive space
1GB of RAM recommended

Mac OSX 10.4.9 or later
Flash Player 6 or higher
8MB of free hard drive space
1GB of RAM recommended

When you load JING, there is a graphic that looks like the sun located on the top of your screen. You click the capture icon

size the screen of your capture and then click Video to make a movie. With a mic connected to your pc, you can give instructions and click on stop when finished.

Finally, you can click on

Share to get a link to your movie or Embed and then copy the tag to your web page. Real Easy.

Downside is that you can't edit your movie but heck, what you want for free anyway's?

Here's an example of a movie I created

Technorati Tags: computer science education, jing, screen capture software

Great resource for AP Computer Science Teachers

Brian Scarbeau — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 14:35:23 GMT

Debbie Carter who teaches AP Computer Science at Lancaster Day School in Lancaster, PA has put together an excellent resource book for AP Computer Science Teachers. You can get the book at apcentral.collegeboard.com. I've worked with Debbie as a member of the now defunct Microsoft Faculty Advisory Board and presently as a Board Member for the Computer Science Teachers Association.

The book contains information that will help both a beginner teacher and veteran teachers as well. It has five chapters and the first chapter reviews the history of AP Computer Science along with a course description and review of key concepts and skills that must be covered during the school year with our students.

One thing that I liked from the start is that Debbie went out to the AP Computer Science community of teachers and asked them for input on different topics covered in the book. I recognized familiar names that I've met in the past at workshops in the book.

Chapter 2 was advice for AP Computer Science Teachers. What is hard for many of us teaching the course is that we are the only teacher in our school teaching the course and it does get lonely when we run into a problem and may need some help. The advice given was very good and I've been pretty good at figuring out what I need to teach in the curriculum but what has been tough in the 11 years that I've taught the course are the many changes that have been made to the curriculum. I started teaching PASCAL to my students and then C++ and now JAVA. I've adapted to these changes and my students have benefited by their successes at learning the material and passing the AP exam with a good score.

Chapter 3 is about course organization. Several sample syllabi are listed for teachers to use in their course. The only problem is that the case study that we need to teach our students has changed and the syllabi don't reflect that change but any teacher can include that into the syllabus.

Chapter 4 discusses the exam and the format. A teacher really needs to know how students are graded on this exam because it may be different from how they grade their own exams. Exam preparation is the key to student successes and there are many exam review books teachers can use with their students to prepare.

The last chapter has many resources for teachers to use. There are many things teachers can do to help teach the class and one I would strongly recommend is professional development.

Last month I attended the CS/IT Symposium in Atlanta and Fran Trees who has been around the AP Computer Science world for a long time gave an excellent presentation on GridWorld which is the new case study.

Go to the CS/IT site and get her slides to help you prepare for the case study.

There are two appendix at the back of the book that reviews the new case study and has supplemental documents.

If you are a new teacher, I would suggest getting help early in your teaching so you don't get too frustrated. There are many of us to help!

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: AP Computer Science, GridWorld, AP

Working with moodle

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:48:43 GMT

For the past three months, I've been working with an open source course online management system called moodle. Moodle is free and has many features such as:

Forums
Content managing (resources)
Quizzes with different kinds of questions
Blogs
Wikis
Database activities
Surveys
Chat
Glossaries
Peer assessment
Multi-language support (over 60 languages are supported for the interface

Moodle has gained in popularity amongst educators and the statistics have proven that with a user base of 18,204 registered sites with 7,270,260 users in 712,531 courses.

The course that I developed was an Introduction to Computer Science course. I used a textbook for the online course called Computer Literacy Basics by Thompson Course Technology. My time was spent mostly on content than it was learning how to use moodle.

Quite frankly, moodle was easy to use and the content took some time because I created the slide deck and video content to go along with the course and the evaluation tool after each lesson.

I created the movies with Camtasia software by TechSmith. Camtasia allows you to record, edit and share high-quality screen video on the Web, CD-ROM and portable media players, including iPod. Here's anexample of one of the movies that I created. There were 3 modules that were created and a total of 29 lessons.

Module 1: Computing Fundamentals

Module 2: Key Applications

Module 3: Living Online

Even though this will be an online course, there will still be an instructor working with the students taking the course.

The chat will also be used by students so they can communicate with each other.

I had a few of my students review some of the lessons and they liked it so hopefully future students will like it as well. All in all, I liked working with moodle.

So, what is Alice anyways?

Brian Scarbeau — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:03:36 GMT

Alice is a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world.

Although computer programming has existed in its modern form for half a century, it still eludes all but a small fraction of society. While programming is an inherently difficult activity, there are currently many barriers, both mechanical and sociological, that prevent large portions of the population from learning to program a computer.

Alice address both the mechanical and sociological barriers that currently prevent many students from successfully learning to program a computer. Alice addresses the mechanical barriers to programming by making it much easier for students to create programs. Rather than having to correctly type commands according to obscure rules of syntax, students drag-and-drop words in a direct manipulation interface. This user interface ensures that programs are always well-formed. In addition, Alice reifies object-based programming by providing animated, on-screen 3D virtual objects.

Sociological barriers are far more complex. Alice addresses the specific needs of the subpopulation of middle school girls. By supporting storytelling, an intrinsically motivating activity for middle school girls, Alice will make programming a means to an exciting end.

Electronic Arts is even involved with this project. Carnegie Mellon University has entered into a groundbreaking collaboration with Electronic Arts Inc., that has the potential to revolutionize and reinvigorate computer science education in the US from middle school through senior high and beyond.

EA has agreed to help underwrite the development of Alice 3.0 - a popular, object-oriented, Java-based computer-programming environment created by Carnegie Mellon researchers - and provide essential arts assets from "The Sims™" - the best selling PC video game of all time.

The Sims content will transform the Alice software from a crude, 3D programming tool into a compelling and user-friendly programming environment. Development for Alice 3.0 will begin immediately and will span the next 18 to 24 months.r s Experts say that when the transformation is complete, the new programming environment will be in position to become the national standard for teaching software programming.

High school computer science teachers can review some new textbooks for Alice. More information about Alice can be found here

You can download Alice here.

What to teach after the AP Computer Science Exam?

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:34:00 GMT

There is always some time left after the AP exam to teach our students more before we leave them for the summer. In Florida, we have a couple of weeks to learn more and if you’re from different parts of the country you may have even more time to teach students something new.

I am really sold on having students learn about creating games so that’s what I’ll be doing with my students. There are several options available for you to do with your students and several languages to use as well.

If you want your students to continue to learn about JAVA then there are two game opportunities that are pretty good. One is robocode which I’ve used with students in past years. Robocode is a fighting game with robots. The Robocode's battles take place in an arena, where small automated 6-wheeled robots fight it out until only one is left. You can compete with individual robots or with a team of robots. Students create their own robot and code the robot to survive in the battlefield.

The other game is a space invader game. This tutorial comes with all the sprites and sounds to create this game with some good instructions on advanced JAVA concepts that are not covered in the AP course.

Another good project is in J# and it’s called Hunt the Wombat. You can have your students learn a different IDE and they can experience intellisense when they code.

Hunt for the Wombat is a 4-6 week project designed to give AP Computer Science students the opportunity to apply their programming skills, gain broader awareness and understanding of the software development process and have fun along the way. By participating in a "real world" scenario where they build a computer game, students can gain experience with project teams, methodologies and core development phases: Discovery, Design, Development and Deployment.

There’s opportunities for your students to use their Visual Basic.NET skills by working with the Black Jack Card Game The Card Game Starter Kit is a fully-functional blackjack card game. It contains a reusable framework for building your own custom card games!

For C# fans there is Space Blitz by Andy Dunn from Zbuffer Games. Andy is a Microsoft MVP and I was fortunate to have lunch with him and new Microsoft MVP Bill Reiss at the Microsoft Summit last month in Seattle. Space Blitz has a video to download as well as a 2d Primer.

There is also rocket commander. The Rocket Commander tutorials will show you how you can create visually stunning 3D games in a series of 30-minute videos.

If you want your students to get really excited then you can introduce them to XNA game express. Why? Because the games that they learn how to create can be deployed on their xbox at home and with the xbox creator club, the game can be shared with friends.

XNA is based on Visual C# Express Edition and allows you to create games for both Windows PC’s and the Xbox 360. XNA Game Studio Express contains the following:

The XNA Framework, a set of managed code development libraries that make it possible for game developers to be more productive when creating games for Windows and the Xbox 360.
The XNA Framework Content Pipeline, which is a set of tools that allow developers to more easily incorporate 3D content into their games.
XNA Game Studio Express also contains a full set of documentation, how-tos, and starter kits that demonstrate how best to use the content pipeline and XNA Framework.

XNA comes with a starter kit called Space war. Students can bring in their xbox controller and connect to a pc and view the code to see how the game is created. They can modify the game as well to make things run faster, slower etc.

All in all, there is plenty of material available for your students to have FUN! Why not, they deserve it after studying hard for the AP Computer Science Exam.

Ready to GRAVA?

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:23:00 GMT

At the MVP summit, I learned about Grava. This new educational product from Microsoft is both an authoring and developer tool. Here's an example of what I mean:

If you've been in the education market for long you can see that this application looks like an application created with Hyperstudio. What's different about Grava is that the product has its own SDK built on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and provides a programming model and tools for building rich educational experiences.

I learned how to use Grava and developed an application on the History of Gaming that I can use with my students. It was pretty easy to put together in a weekend and I'll show it to my students soon to see if they like it.

I'm sure book publishers would like this product so developers can create applications to compliment the textbook used by students.

Check it out if you want.

AP Teachers & Students Exam Preparation Resources

Brian Scarbeau — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:12:00 GMT

Right now, all of our classes are finishing up with teaching the AP computer science course and all of the requirements given in the AP JAVA subset. If you are looking for review material, here is a list that I've found to be valuable to my students. Review books: The one that I have used for 11 years now has been the book by Skylight Publishing called Be Prepared for the AP Computer Science Exam in JAVA. The book is written by Maria Litving along with Roger Frank, Judith Hromcik, Dave Wittry and Gary Litvin. All contributors except for Gary are AP Teachers and have been involved with the CollegeBoard either as Readers, Chief Readers, or Exam contributors. The book reviews all concepts required for the exam and has 2 practice exams in both the A and AB part. My students in the past have told me that if you can pass the Litvin review book tests then you'll get a good score on the AP exam. Eimacs.com has the exam online if you want your students to review that way. The 2nd book that I required my students to get was the McGraw-Hill book called 5 Steps to a 5 AP Computer Science written by David Levine and Kathleen Larson. David is a college professor and Kathleen a high school AP Computer Science teacher. The layout of the book is similiar to the Litvin book and it too comes with 2 practice exams for the A & AB exam. The students liked the practice exam especially the free response questions because they were easy. This book gives students success on the taking the practice exams but they do find the Litvin book harder. Roselyn Teukolsky has a reveiw book that Barron's puts out called the AP Computer Science 2007 Levels A and AB. I don't use this resource book because of time. Barbara Cloud who teaches at Colgate University and Chris Nevison also a Professor at Colgate and was the Chief Reader a couple of years ago has some AP CS resources that you need to purchase but it has good reviews and 2 AP exams for students to review. Georgia Tech has a nice site where you can take A or AB multiple choice questions online and you get feedback from your answers. http://manatee.cc.gt.atl.ga.us/apExam/begin_test.jsp Finally, the CollegeBoard site has several Free Response Questions from past years to give your students and you can purchase the 2004 AP CS exam from the CollegeBoard with gives you an idea of what they test in JAVA. Better hurry up and start reviewing because you only have about a month left for the exam. Good luck!!

This is when learning takes place!

Brian Scarbeau — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:18:00 GMT

Yesterday in my web design class I overheard my only female grade 9 student tell her classmates that she was able to help out her older brothers myspace web page by remembering what she learned in html and applying that knowledge by fixing his page. She was very proud of herself when telling this story. Needless to say, her teacher was very proud of her too.

AP Computer Science Course

Brian Scarbeau — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:32:00 GMT

Alfred Thompson, a former high school computer science teacher and now a Microsoft employee, blogged today on taking a look at AP Computer Science.

Quite timely I thought even after I posed this question last week to Microsoft boss Bill Gates, "Is computer science education dead". Quite timely indeed even after I said something to my Associate Director here at school on Friday about how frustrated I am teaching AP Computer Science and that when our school hires another Computer Science Teacher next year that maybe that's when I have that teacher teach AP Computer Science and not me.

Alfred walks on dangerous waters posing this question but kudos to him for stating what he believes in. To give history to those that don't know about the Advanced Placement courses: The program began in 1955 as a way to give bright high-school students a chance to get ahead before college. That year, 1,300 students took AP exams nationwide, compared with more than 660,000 last year according to the College Board (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-apclasses1907mar19,0,479211.story?page=1)

The program charges $85.00 per test and last year 14,059 students took the AP Computer Science A exam. It is a tough exam that students are required to take and a tough job for AP computer science teachers to prepare students. Teaching in the south allows me to have more time to teach my students than teaching in the north. Our school year starts in August and in the north they start after labor day. The exam is in early May and the AP curriculum consists of several standard topics to cover along with a case study. In the past, my students have done well on the exam. I teach bright students at a private school. All my students passed the exam last year.

If you're interested you can find out more about the curriculum at this site: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_compscia.html?compscia

I have taught AP Computer Science for 11 years now and there have been 3 languages. Pascal, C++ and now JAVA. When new versions and improvements of JAVA come out then the curriculum gets changed. The case study is also going to be changed for the next school year.

I only teach one section of AP Computer Science and my enrollments have always been low for this course. We have made changes at our school where we are now requiring incoming Grade 9 students to take Honors Programming or Web Design to meet the school's computer science requirement. We are also requiring students in lower and middle school to get introduced to programming at our younger age. I'm also changing the curriculum for our Honors Programming II class to teach XNA and C# so students can create games and deploy them to their XBOX console. Hopefully, more interest in the Advanced Placement course will take place with these changes.

Back to Alfred's blog.... He brings up good points but as they say "You're not going to change city hall". The language JAVA will stay the same because it's free and is an OOP language that runs on all platforms, the test will be the same because the rubric works with the questions that are asked, the level of difficulty will remain the same because it's a college course and students get college credit. What still needs to get addressed is why some colleges and universities don’t accept the AP score that a high school students gets for taking this difficult course and exam. Many schools don’t accept a 3 or 4 which is a passing score for the AP exam. They might take a 5. This has always been the case with students getting frustrated for passing the exam but not being able to get 3 college credits by certain universities. Maybe something can be done about that. Alfred, can you add that to your list?