Days 12-13: Final drawing projects

AP CSA

Apparently I mis-calculated how long some of these labs would take.  I gave students Friday as an extra work day.  Some students got really creative with their work, and others... didn't.  Here were my more creative labs:

I certainly needed to give more guidance around the fish tank lab.  Some students drew directly in the "Fish Panel" file rather than creating a new class/constructor to make a generic fish.  On Thursday, we talked about how the 3 files were supposed to interact - next time, I think I will need to make a video about this so students can re-visit it.  I had to re-explain it to a few students on Friday who were just not ready to hear it on Thursday.

I also don't know how to make students be more creative.  Giving students an "example" sometimes does more harm than good - I tend to see a lot of identical fish.

AP CSP

Yesterday we did the TCP lesson with the unplugged activity.  It took a short amount for them for to create their protocol - we were able to get the whole lesson in pretty easily.   The unplugged activity was significantly more successful - students really got the point of packet loss.

Today we did the DNS lesson - again, the unplugged activity was most valuable.  I think next time I would print out a list of names so students wouldn't take so much time writing down the actual names (in a class of 38 that's a lot).  The rest of the time we did research and started to work on some notebook items.

I am still trying to figure out how I will assess this unit.  I have a multiple choice test that I think I will give students in a "group practice" sort of way.  I really liked what I did last year with the "make an infographic", but I love Dan's research project.  I worry that if I give students a choice between the two projects, one will be way shorter than the other.

Concepts

We played trashetball and then had a quiz - nothing too exciting.  It is clear that game-ify-ing this class is helpful to break up the discussions.

One good thing

I have one student who is really great at trying to tie AP CSP content back to the real world.  90% of the questions I don't know the answer to, but he helps me learn a ton!