I was wondering if anyone has created Challenge projects or something for students to work on to apply everything they have learned in unit 5 that is not the Create Performance task.
I was thinking either making an app and showing students how it works and asking them to duplicate the project or just giving them a written challenge and asking them to create an app for it.
Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated. (it also might be something nice to have for after the AP test)
@zbrennem YES! Well, somewhat. We have done two “all-class” projects… one is the math blast-off app (which I wrote about here) and the other is a hangman app.
The math app only really covers chapter 1 material. For hangman, it covers almost everything in unit 5 with the exception of looping through arrays. Students still need to create an array of words for the computer to pull from, so it gets a bit into arrays, but not a ton.
Just a note, I have found that if I have an idea, I ask students to “theme-ify” it which gets them more excited. So I had a “Harry Potter Hangman” a “Casino Hangman” a “Dungeons and Dragons Hangman” all sorts of things…
Finally, last year, I had students make an app that was a typing game. Essentially they had to make a typing game that had a high-score screen (this is in the post-ap materials). That went over well too. Again, there were all sorts of takes on the app - some involved animation, some were psychologically tricky (like a typing game where people had to type colors that were written in a different color…).
Also, it sounds like you are pretty far ahead if you are looking for more to do. Do you have any ideas as to how you got so far? Did you move through some material more quickly than planned?
Let us know how it goes!!
KT
The reason I was asking is that I have a hand full of students that are very advanced and I need to find a way to push them. They have a more extensive programming background. I like the hangman project a lot and the math blast-off will be good too. Thank you.
I really struggled last year to complete all the units and the Performance tasks for AP because my school is on a block schedule so my class only meets every other day for about 85 minutes. This year I’ve been trying to speed everything up.
I think the biggest thing I did this year was assign most of Unit 3 as Homework. We still did the group project at the end in class but the students were very successful working through Unit 3 at home and I would build in time in class for questions. This saved me a lot of time.
I am thinking of giving my students a project using http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html. I would challenge them to come up with their javascript version of a game.
Warning: some of the games are inappropriate for the classroom. Please review the site before using. Sorry, great resource but it is still the Internet…
Happy computing,
Andrea
I just finished an app with my kids that I used as their trimester 2 exam - personality matching based around a theme of their choice. I have a huge group of fans of “The Office” in that class, so we talked about it from that standpoint, but you could easily use any theme.
From a coding perspective, you really can get by with the IF statement…so after 5-8 or so, but one of my students used arrays for his questions and answers and it was much more scalable that way.
Here’s a sample:
The real work goes into how you’re going to decide on “matching” personalities once you ask a series of questions. We use a pretty simple point system, but better matching algorithms would be a nice challenge here as well.
I assign optional HW every night. This helps with my advanced students who want/need more work. My HWs have AP questions, research, articles and videos as well as explanations from the classwork.
My best students don’t need more help with coding. They need more help with reading and writing. I feel that reading articles, responding to them and practicing AP questions are the best challenge for my good coders.