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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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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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Tackling the Staircase Problem with Coding and Math

During his TED talk , Conrad Wolfram  describes computer programming as a means of recording procedures and processes and he offers that it is a great way to fully engage students and to check that they truly understand the concept being explored. He says that students gain intuition and experience in far greater quantities through programming and are able to tackle more challenging problems. Thus, they are “able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do.” In other words, programming is an opportunity to do and understand mathematics! With this in mind, let's take a look at the following problem: How many different ways are there to climb a staircase with n steps (for example, 100 steps) if you are allowed to skip steps but not more than one at a time?    A programming approach to this problem was discussed by Maria Litvin during a panel discussion at the 2011 PyCon Con
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