1. AP CS Principles

2. Computer Science for everyone Until now, high school CS has been either nonexistent or limited to the AP CS A course. CS A is the only Advanced Placement exam with declining enrollment (as % of HS kids) CS A is taken almost entirely by white or Asian males. CS Principles was designed to be inclusive and welcoming.

7. The most important link is to the Course and Exam Description, which includes the Curriculum Framework. The next few slides are sample pages from different sections of this document.

8. The framework uses a hierarchy of ideas: Big ideas (seven of them; put them up on the classroom wall). Enduring Understandings (what the CB wants students to remember after the course). Learning Objectives (skills students should have). Essential Knowledge (there are hundreds of these— despite the name, the CB does not expect you to teach all of them, and we don’t).

9. You don’t have to teach all the EKs, so don’t drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of the handwavy or trivial ones!

10. Sometimes they tell you what they don’t expect you to teach. (But BJC teaches much more than the minimum requirements, especially about programming.)

11. Note that 60% of the grade comes from the 9% of assessment time that kids spend in the sit-down multiple-choice exam!

12. The Explore Task: Analyze an innovation technically and socially.

13. The Create Task: Write and document a program.

14. The sit-down test: Note no questions on Creativity; 20% each for Algorithms and Programming; Global Impact takes the rear at 10%. (BJC takes programming and social implications as our two main organizing topics.)

15. CSP is “language agnostic” so test questions use a made-up language that comes in both text and block forms. This is an excerpt from the “cheat sheet” they prepared to give to students.

17. Several EUs and LOs appear in more than one unit. We teach them over the entire yearlong course.