February AP CSA Newsletter- Course Pacing, Exam Prep, and more! 💻

🗓️ Course Pacing: Where Students Should Be

As you start off the second semester, you may be wondering if you are on track for the year. At this point in the year, you should be in Unit 8 - Arrays 2D Arrays. The last 3 units should take roughly 7 weeks, which will leave you some time to review before the AP test.

It's ok to be a little behind the pace and you should continue to prioritize earlier units, but there are things you may want to consider to help make up time. Several lessons cover skills that do not impact future lessons and can be pushed off to the end of the year or assigned for homework. These include lessons on searching and sorting (7.5 and 7.6) and Ethical Issues Around Data Collection (7.7). You can also reduce the number of exercises that students are required to complete.

💻 Digital Exam Prep

The AP Computer Science A exam will be digital this year and will use the Bluebook App. You can now download the app and preview the exam to see the tools that students will have available to them during the exam. The College Board also has a variety of resources available on their Digital AP Exams page. Spend some time exploring these resources to ensure that you are preparing students for success in May!

📊 AP CSA Project of the Month

The CodeHS Project catalog offers a multitude of projects to enhance your course. This month's featured project is Letter Histogram. In this project, students will use strings and arrays to create a histogram of the number of letters in a given text. The project reads in a file for students and they will then analyze each letter of the file to create and display a histogram of the letters.

This project is considered easy difficulty, taking an estimated one hour to complete.

🧑‍🏫 Upcoming AP Webinar: Preparing Students for the AP CSA FRQs

In this webinar, you will learn more about what to expect as it relates to FRQs and how to better prepare your students. Our team will also introduce you to the CodeHS FRQ Center which is a great spot for students to explore past exam FRQs in a variety of formats.

Date: March 4th, 2025
Time: 3:00pm CT