Unit 1: Introduction to Programming

Students develop an interactive game they can install on their phones, generate a conversation between animated characters, create abstract art, and explore storytelling animation through sprite interaction; and in doing so they learn to use pair programming and to create program documentation. Students also investigate legal and ethical issues that arise in computing--especially with regard to data collation and privacy.

Unit 2: Abstraction

Students implement an algorithm for a guessing game using local and global variables; use abstract data types and list traversal to build a quiz app; create predicates to filter lists in order to solve a crossword puzzle; and use the modulus functions and a higher order function to code mathematical functions. Students also investigate the history, purpose, laws, evolution, and enforcement of copyright.

Unit 3: Data Structures

Students explore complexity in a variety of contexts(maze navigation, fractal art, tic-tac-toe): use nested abstract data types and data I/O to develop a contact list app; and consider the beneficial and harmful impacts of robots and AI.

Practice AP Create Task

Students create a project of their own choosing as practice for the AP Create Task. They select and use a development process, plan and code their program test their program for errors, write about their development process, and acknowledge any code developed by other people.

Unit 4: How the Internet Works

Students learn about how the Internet works, the befits and vulnerabilities of fault-tolerant systems; cybersecurity practices such as public key encryption and individual level practices and software to keep data safe; digital data representation including binary representation; compression algorithms. They also consider the impact of the Internet on human communication and the workplace.

Unit 5: Algorithms and Simulations

Students learn about program efficiency through exploration of the binary and linear search algorithms; learn about sequential, parallel, and distributed computing and determine the contexts in which each are most useful; consider the contexts in which simulation is useful and implement a simple simulation; Snap! data tools to generate knowledge from data.