I am trying to figure out the order of how I want to teach these units for next school year. Does anyone have any advice? I want my students to be successful with all parts of this AP course.
I’ve taught them in the order in which they are laid out. We start our school year in early August and manage to get through the first six units by December. I have taught several versions of this curriculum where the topics have been laid out differently. I feel the current layout has been well thought out and gets enough material done in time for the students to do their create task on time even if we can get through units 1 - 5 by December. Also, not diving into programming in the first weeks of school helps when students are still adding and dropping classes.
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Hello! I noticed several major changes in how the units are ordered in the '23-'24 curriculum. Does anyone know why? Has there been a published explanation or rationale for why the updated course has changed the order of the units? I was very happy with how my students performed in the course and on the AP Exam the past two years, when we saved the units on Data and Cybersecurity / Innovations until after the Create PT was completed in the spring. I would like some more information about the reasons for these changes to help me decide whether to follow the new order, or continue to use the previous order that worked well. Thanks!
I don’t have first hand knowledge of this, but there is a CSP Changelog with a little info on unit order:
We’ve heard feedback from teachers that students should work with the datasets in AppLab before using them in their programs. To address this, we moved the Data unit so that it now precedes students the Lists, Loops, and Traversals unit. We hope that by working with the datasets before using them in their programs, students will be able to develop more meaningful and authentic applications of these datasets. Nothing has changed about the focus of each unit, just the sequence.
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