compsci

Everyone who has seen it loves these Lewis/Loftus books.  Start here http://www.aw-bc.com/APjava/ and click on a book.  Look on the book’s page (book, prep book, ab book) for “Request an exam copy.”
We struggled to get this to work, so I hope you are able to get it going after the workshop.

[Read more]

If you’re not already familiar with it, the TopCoder programming competition is an ongoing online competition complete with prizes.  There is a high school division.  All of the former problems are up online and can be done at any time.  Students can get their feet wet practicing on these problems, and then compete in the weekly [...]

[Read more]

The link to the Quick Reference Guide is broken on the College Board Web site.

[Read more]

Welcome to Taft and to the workshop I am offering this week.  We have a great group and a busy week planned.  I have revised my materials to place major emphasis on the new GridWorld case study. 

[Read more]

The ACM is the largest association of computing professionals in the country.  They have a number of interest groups, including a special interest group for computer science educators, or SIGCSE.  The SIGCSE holds two annual conferences.  The one in the United States is an extremely good resource.  You can come back with more books and materials [...]

[Read more]

Today we talked about the order in which I teach my course.  Here it is:
•         Alice (I:\..\AP Computer Science\Alice)
•         Object and classes (BlueJ) 
     o        using strings and literal constants only
     o        Bank account class (I:\..\Java code\BankAccount.java)
     o        Shapes in BlueJ (I:\..\Java code\Canvas)
•         Complie-Run cycle and standard Java classes
     o        Objects are stored as references
     o        Point [...]

[Read more]

Patty found some terrific resources that I had never seen before. 
The first is a data representation Applet that demonstrates different interpretations of the same 32-bit number in Java.  You enter a number (in decimal, binary, hex or 4 character String and it shows you how Java stores that value.  I’ve never seen a tool that does [...]

[Read more]

Leon Schram is a teacher in Texas who can be a tremendous resource for your classes.  In addition to having some good information on his Web site, he offers a bundle of course materials that you can use to teach your class.  According to Charlie, you can purchase Leon’s materials in the form of a [...]

[Read more]

Here is a tutorial from Sun on using packages to store your different files in different packages and deal with importing them.  The GridWorld case study has forced me to use import and packagemore than I have had to throughout my teaching career: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/package/index.html

[Read more]

We wrapped up our Java fundamentals yesterday and had our first look at Gridworld.  The Actor class and the “Bugs” that inherit from it are a great introduction to how the system behaves, how you can take control of Actor behavior and work within the system to have objects crawl around on the screen.
Today we [...]

[Read more]