Greetings. This is my first year with AP CSP. As we gear up for the AP CSP test, I’m wondering if there are some other lesson ideas outside of practice tests. I have a slew of practice test questions, but I can see students getting burned out on two weeks of practice problems. Any other ideas are greatly appreciated. Thanks.
–Matt
Great point! There is only so much of the same type of thing students can handle! How do you review in your other classes?
I sometimes play “Trashketball” which lends itself nicely to practice problems. Essentially I put one question up on the board, students discuss the question in teams and then write their answer on personal whiteboards. Then I have them hold up their boards to check their answers. Groups who get it right, get one point and the chance to make a “trashket” (by throwing a ball into an empty trash bin) for an extra point. Students love it.
I would also look into Kahoot or other ways to game-ify the time.
I would love to hear other ideas out there!
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We use Kahoot - there are some decent AP CSP review games out there and the kids enjoy it.
Another activity is to write up questions on index cards, and then have a round robin type of activity.
Mary
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Here are some Kahoot games I used last year (I haven’t gone back and revised for this year yet)
https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/b38e0a00-e550-4020-b7ff-d4351f2ad1d5
https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/6827ff28-1c32-4a9c-b478-9016295d82e2
https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/fd53ef08-eecb-43b0-b414-7e05d6ba2d0f
https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/d948f05e-badc-477b-8522-c66ab94a143c
And I stole and modified this review assignment from another teacher (unfortunately I’ve forgotten where I got it from), and I assign it during the week leading up to the exam. Again I haven’t updated it yet for this year, so there may be some out of date info on it. Google docs link.
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Wow! Thanks so much, this is a great way to review.
Another teacher I know will have students build a concept map (okay I don’t know what it’s called, if it has a name, but “concept map” is descriptive-ish). Students get a bunch of vocab on slips of paper. (I would just type them on a table/grid and have students cut them out.) Students work in groups to glue down a vocab word onto a big poster paper (say vocab A), then draw a line to another vocab word (vocab B) and glue down vocab B, then they must explain what is the exact connection between vocab A and vocab B.
You can have students in a group split the cards evenly and go turn-by-turn with the objective of getting rid of all their cards.
For example, the first student puts down “router”. The next student puts down “IP address” and draw a line between the two terms and can explain “all devices connected to routers have unique addresses called IP addresses”. The next student puts down “DNS” and connects it to “IP address” and can explain “a DNS server looks up the IP address of a domain name”. The next student can put down another word or even connect “DNS” to “router” and say something like “a DNS server is connected to a router”. Okay, that’s kinda cheap, so let’s say that student couldn’t think of anything else and couldn’t think of how to use the cards they currently had.
Most likely you would need to provide more structure than my vague description, and it’s definitely something that takes some modeling and correcting for students to start getting the idea since it’s a relatively open-ended task. It’s also preeeetty high-level IMO, but I guess worst case is students come up with very weak or loose connections.
I haven’t tried this myself for computer science, but I plan to try it this year to prep my students for the exam. (I’ve tried it with physics and found the vocab is too specific and restrictive to allow students much freedom in the task.)
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I don’t have a slew of practice questions. Can you give me a suggestion on where to find some? I know about the ones in the Purple book.
Hi @margaret.birch,
Log in to your College Board AP Course Audit site (https://account.collegeboard.org/login/login?appId=205) and dig around for a “Secure Documents” section. There should be two full-length practice exams - one from 2016, another from 2018.
Also many test prep books have practice questions (mostly created by the book authors I think), and I heard there’s a question bank on the CodeHS website somewhere. Also, if you login to the AP CSP community message board (on the College Board website - https://apcommunity.collegeboard.org/group/apcsp/home), there are some files posted of multiple choice questions created by some of last summer’s AP readers.
Frank
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