November AP CSA Insider: Course Pacing, Holiday Projects, and More!

🗓️ Course Pacing: Where Students Should Be

By this point in the year, most classes will be completing Unit 2 and starting Unit 3: Class Creation. This pace will keep you on track to finish the course with time left for review before the exam. If you’re running a bit behind, don’t worry — the key concepts from Units 1 and 2, such as working with objects, method calls, conditionals, and loops, are reinforced throughout Unit 3 as students start writing their own classes and methods. To stay on track, consider trimming time by focusing on the most essential learning goals rather than completing every activity in each lesson. It’s better to ensure a strong understanding of core ideas than to rush through for the sake of coverage.

As you begin Unit 3, keep in mind that one of the AP Exam’s Free Response Questions focuses specifically on the class design skills developed in this unit. The mid-unit and end-of-unit FRQs in AP CSA (Cortado) mirror this question format, giving students valuable practice with the same kinds of tasks they’ll see on the exam. For additional reinforcement, teachers can assign past FRQs available in the AP FRQ Center, which provide even more examples of class design and object-oriented programming in action.

💻 AP CSA Project of the Month

This month's featured project is Holiday Wrapping Paper. In this project, students will use conditionals, loops, and String methods to calculate the wrapping paper needed to wrap holiday presents. This project should take students about an hour and includes autograders.

Here is the premise of the project: “The holidays are quickly approaching and you realize you may have made a mistake volunteering to wrap ALL the holiday presents at your local mall. With only a few days to spare, your boss sent you a list of the dimensions for all the remaining packages to wrap and asked you how much more wrapping paper to order.”

📝 Leveraging Labs

Labs are a great way to break up the curriculum and give students an opportunity to create a larger-scale project. All of the College Board labs can be completed right on the CodeHS platform and include student prompts. You can find all of the labs, including CodeHS-created labs, in Supplemental Material or in the separate AP CSA Labs course found here. The bottom of the course syllabus lists when each lab can be completed in the course.

Note: These labs are not required. Your students will meet the 20- hour coding requirement easily by completing the course.

🤝 Request a Visit from CodeHS for CSEdWeek

From December 1st–12th, CodeHS team members are visiting classrooms to celebrate Computer Science Education Week! Request a visit from the team or explore Hour of Code and Hour of AI activities you can assign to students during CSEdWeek. The deadline to request a visit is November 15th.

🧑‍🏫 Upcoming Free Webinars

We have a number of free webinars on the calendar this fall, including webinars that can help you prepare to run an Hour of Code or Hour of AI during CSEdWeek and an AP CSA PLC.

AP CSA PLC
Nov 18th at 6:00pm CT
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Preparing to Teach an Hour of AI for HS and MS
Nov 18th at 3:00pm CT
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Preparing to Teach an Hour of Code for HS and MS
Nov 20th at 3:00pm CT

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