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Bellaire High School AP CS Principles

Bellaire High School AP CS A



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Setting the Stage for Students

A few days ago, my AP CS Principles students completed a multi-screen app project in the Code.org App Lab environment. I was simply blown away by the creativity of their apps! This is the third year I've taught the Code.org curriculum, and this year I focused more on peer feedback and the iterative process. We began the lesson by introducing the project - creating an app whose design included at least 4 screens and whose code included event handlers allowing the user to interact with the app. The  rubric  also laid out the expectations that: 1) The intended purpose of the app is clear. 2) The app is visually appealing and the user interface is intuitive to use. On the day that the app was due, I asked students to trade their app with a peer, go through the rubric, and give each other constructive feedback based on the rubric. They shared with at least two peers, and then I asked them to modify their app based on the feedback they received. I explained that this version is con
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You Don't Necessarily Know...

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Eddie (not his real name) was one of 33 students in one of my AP CS Principles classes last year. Eddie consistently did not to do assigned homework for my class. He was always pleasant and polite during class and clearly enjoyed the content of the course. However, by March, I had become very frustrated that he would not complete his work. His lack of follow-through was particularly frustrating in an AP course which requires that students independently complete two performance tasks as part of the College Board requirements. Last year we lost the first three weeks of school to Hurricane Harvey, and lost a couple more school days to snow and then to the Astros. So I was running dangerously low on patience as I felt pressure to finish covering the curriculum during AP crunch time. By March, Eddie was badly failing my class because of missing and incomplete assignments. Despite verbal promises to me that he would submit his practice performance programming task, he did not. I was ve
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Hedwig's Theme for Penny

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I recently visited my 5 nieces in Pittsburgh who are immersed in the Harry Potter book series. My oldest niece played Hedwig's Theme on the piano for me. I've been working on a session proposal for the 2018 T3 International Conference and decided to submit a proposal on creating music on the TI Innovator Hub. As a demo, I wrote a program that plays the first few lines of Hedwig's Theme. Hedwig is Harry Potter's dear owl. Here is a video of the program being run on the TI-Nspire connected to the Innovator Hub. Ancient Greeks, in particular the Pythagoreans, are known as the first to investigate musical scales in terms of simple ratios. They discovered that a lyre string that is half the length of a given lyre string emits a musical note that is an octave higher than that of the given lyre string. I encoded the tune of Hedwig's Theme with help from the TI 10 Minutes of Code for the Innovator Hub using the TI-Nspire . In particular, Unit 2: Skillbuilder 3 explains
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