{"id":485,"date":"2010-06-25T09:23:57","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T14:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/?p=485"},"modified":"2010-08-25T21:06:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T02:06:34","slug":"ap-computer-science-summer-institute-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/ap-computer-science-summer-institute-report\/","title":{"rendered":"AP Computer Science Summer Institute Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well,
\nMy AP Summer Institute officially wrapped up on Thursday.\u00a0 It was a great week and we covered lots of material and had fun doing it.<\/p>\n

I had participants from all over with the furthest coming from Florida.\u00a0 Last year, I had a participant from China which was cool as well.\u00a0 I found out that some of my attendees this year had mad skills, including Senior Olympic archery, Vice-Presidential experience, Athletic Training, CIA experience, Social disturbia ( pretty sure that is the proper description and a pretty common comp sci diagnosis ), Home Improvement, Buried Treasure Hunting, Aerobics, Tennis, Fire Safety, and Computer Science.\u00a0 I list Computer Science last as it just does not stack up against the rest.\u00a0 How could Computer Science compete with Buried Treasure Hunting?<\/p>\n

During the workshop, we spent a good deal of time discussing how you could and should use GridWorld<\/a> all year long when teaching the AP A Course.\u00a0 The case study is very dynamic and makes the course much more fun and engaging for the students.\u00a0 It provides a nice game platform as well.<\/p>\n

I also spent tons of time on the basic fundamentals of the AP A course, including ifs, loops, arrays, ArrayList, interfaces, abstract classes, and recursion, but not necessarily in a programming centric way.\u00a0 I tried to present ways to teach the topics that makes them relevant and gives them context to which students can relate.\u00a0 When teaching matrices and interfaces, I teach these topics in the context of Codes and Ciphers<\/a> to show the students some of the ways Computer Science is used beyond just typing in braces and semi-colons.\u00a0 It works well and I think the workshop participants found the approach effective as well.<\/p>\n

Pre\/AP was discussed and I included tools like Scratch, Alice, and Jeroo as pre\/AP courses do not have to be taught using Java.\u00a0 I spent time showing how you can use Scratch, Alice, and Jeroo to teach any AP level topic effectively.\u00a0 We did some nice list processing in Scratch.<\/p>\n

\"Scratch<\/a>

Scratch Pong Game<\/p><\/div>\n

We also spent time discussing ways to broaden participation in Computer Science.\u00a0 Participants visited the ACM Education Policy Committee<\/a> site to see the resources posted there.<\/p>\n

The workshop wrapped up with a look at the new AP Computer Science Principles course that is being developed.\u00a0 Participants visited the AP Computer Science Principles<\/a> site as well as Dan Garcia’s Full Frontal Nerdity<\/a> site ( you have to love the name ) to see some of the resources posted for Dan’s new pilot AP CS course<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lunch everyday was awesome!\u00a0 I am very motivated by food that was a huge plus for sure.\u00a0 It was a great time and I am sad it is over.<\/p>\n

I should have taken some pics, but I didn’t so imagine you see people writing code and looking really excited when looking below this line.
\n(:)(:)(:)~~(:)(:)(:)
\n(:)(:)(:)~~(:)(:)(:)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, My AP Summer Institute officially wrapped up on Thursday.\u00a0 It was a great week and we covered lots of material and had fun doing it. I had participants from all over with the furthest coming from Florida.\u00a0 Last year, I had a participant from China which was cool as well.\u00a0 I found out that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,23,20,3],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apluscompsci.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}