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Bellaire High School AP CS Principles

Bellaire High School AP CS A



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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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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 i...
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Teaching = Removing Obstacles for Students

Recently I witnessed how removing a small obstacle for one of my students led to a powerful transformation in how this student sees himself.  A few days ago I asked my AP CS Principles students to add themselves to my class on the College Board Digital Portfolio so they can submit their Explore and Create performance tasks as part of the AP requirements for the course. In order to do so, they need to log in with their College Board account and then click on the class code of their corresponding class period. When I shared with my students the link to the Digital Portfolio, the vast majority of my 97 students were able to add themselves within a couple minutes. Those who couldn't remember their College Board password had to reset their password and were able to add themselves by the next day. There were a handful of students who had never created a College Board account, so they had to create a new account before adding themselves to the Digital Portfolio. Out of 97 students, on...
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