Hi there,
I’m in my first year of teaching AP CSP, and we are starting after Labor Day (9/7). Our school is on a rotating schedule and I see students 4/6 days for 65 minutes each class.
Most of my students have programming experience, either block based or with Python. In addition, they have to complete a summer assignment on the digital divide, social media, and terms of service for an app or website. I’m planning to use code.org with the CMU CS Python drop in units. I noticed from the forums that data and cybersecurity have been moved to before the Create task in code.org – should I consider moving Create task to after unit 7?
Any thoughts would be helpful, as I’m concerned about students seeing all the content prior to the exam date!
Thank you!
Hi @eoften,
I would encourage you to spend a little time mapping out your lessons on a calendar. It sounds like you have a group of students who will have significant prior knowledge, and can likely pick up some of the material with less time to sit and digest content.
In terms of the order of the units, the CSP Changelog states:
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.
I don’t know that the swap will have a significant impact on your course, but it might be helpful to feel this out as you enter the second semester and have a rhythm for the year. I personally don’t love doing the create task as a single huge block (it ends up being about a month of time in my schedule), so this year I interweaved it with non programming content (Global impacts of computing) doing two weeks at a time of each subject. It may be that the plan that is best for your group diverges from the code.org calendar. That’s okay!