Your January 2024 AP CSP Insider 💻

⏰ Course Pacing: Where Students Should Be

Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed the winter break.

At this point in the year, you should be around Unit 8 Digital Information, or moving on to the Practice Performance Task units. If your classes are running behind, we recommend that you skip the practice PT modules so you can get through the rest of the course content before the exam. You can always come back to these modules if you find yourself with extra time later in the year.

While the Practice PTs are an important part of preparing students for the AP test, students do not need to complete all of the Practice PTs. At a minimum, we recommend completing Module 7: Basic Data Structures and several practice create tasks, including “The Shopping List” and “Testing 1,2,3” found in the supplemental section. “The Shopping List” covers all the requirements for the Create Performance Task while “Testing 1, 2, 3” is more formative and focuses on row 6 of the requirements.

These Practice PTs require students to create and explain all parts of the new create task, while the other Practice PTs are designed to be formative and cover only part of the Performance Task.

As a reminder, you can view sample Performance Tasks created on our system here.

View the syllabi here:

🛒 Project of the Month: The Shopping List

For this problem, you are going to create a program that asks the user for a list of ingredients. As the user enters the ingredients, you should store them in a list. Once the user is done entering their list, you need to pass this list to a function that will compare the ingredients to an already existing list of pantry items.

This project is a practice Create Performance Task that covers all requirements. It can also be found in the supplemental section of your AP CSP course.

🌟 Resource Spotlight: Lesson Plans

CodeHS lesson plans include classroom materials, activity ideas, handouts, and discussion questions that correspond to CodeHS course lessons. Free teachers can access the first five lesson plans of any course at no cost, and CodeHS Pro teachers have access to all CodeHS lesson plans!

For AP CSP teachers, the first lesson plan contains curriculum resources that directly support key AP CSP standards.

💡 Teacher Tip: Keeping Students Prepared

To better prepare students for the semester ahead, provide them opportunities to review concepts they may have forgotten over the break. Consider assigning students some supplemental modules, practice problems, or reading from our interactive digital textbooks.

View JavaScript resources:
- CodeHS Intro to JavaScript Textbook
- CodeHS Practice Problems in JavaScript

View Python resources:
- CodeHS Intro to Python Textbook
- CodeHS Practice Problems in Python

Recommended supplemental modules:
- Extra Karel Practice
- Extra Karel Puzzles
- Karel Challenges
- Functions and Parameters Practice

📱 Stay Connected

Take care,
Alex Nunez

​Curriculum Developer, CodeHS​