AP Computer Science A (Nitro) — August 2021 Updates
For the upcoming school year, we have made changes to roughly 90 exercises in Nitro, representing about 20% of the exercises in the course. For each exercise, we made slight changes to the exercise in a way that would not change the nature of the exercise but may change the starter code, solution code, and/or the autograder.
For example, in the exercise Loose Change, students are given a starting value of money and need to figure out the minimum number of coins to get to a specific total using the mod function. In this exercise, we changed the starting value and the target value so the new solution and autograder will reflect different values, but the logic to solve the problem is the same.
Why did we make these updates?
One of the biggest problems we hear from teachers is that students can find answers to exercises online. While we try to track down sites with known solutions, it feels like it is a never-ending battle.
By making these changes, over time, we are hoping to create a version control nightmare for sites trying to keep answers. Since most exercises carry the same name but will have slight differences, a student that plugs in an old solution will find that the solution will not work. Since some teachers will use their existing course, these exercises will actually have multiple versions floating around making it harder for students to consistently find solutions online.
We plan to continue these slight modifications going forward to further complicate version control for sites trying to track solutions.
What does this mean for your class?
This change went into effect at the end of the day on August 25th. For any new class/section that is created after that date, the new exercises will be used.
If you created a new section prior to August 26th (or create a new section using an existing course), your section will still have the original exercises in them. If this is the case, you may see an option in the lesson plan for Additional Activities. Additional Activities are activities that have been added to the CodeHS version of the course, but are not currently in your version of the course. In this case, the Additional Activities show the updated exercise.
If you are interested in adding these altered activities to your course, you can do so using our assignment feature.
List of Updated Exercises:
Questions about the CodeHS course changes?
Contact the CodeHS Curriculum Team at hello@codehs.com.
