AP CSA Checklist

Welcome to our webinar here today. We've got a great team on the call as you can see, and so we are ready to get started if you are. All right. So today we are talking AP CSA and all the things that you need to be prepared for in the coming school year for teaching AP Computer Science A. If you would like a copy of the slide deck, we are going to put that into the chat. Steve's already got it there. Thank you so much, Steve. And we welcome you as you settle in and get ready for some great information this hour.

All right. So, my name is Stephanie Bennett. If you have been on a CodeHS webinar for the last couple years, my name and face are probably familiar. But I'm so delighted today to be joined by Steve and Carlos, also from the PD team. And we all have years of experience in the classroom. I am so blessed though to be joined by Steve and Carlos because I was not a computer science teacher, but they both have many years of experience teaching computer science in the classroom and are here today to answer your questions about computer science A, the exam, the CodeHS curriculum, how to get your students excited about this pretty technical and difficult course. But we've got some great suggestions for you. So, what we're going to do today is we are going to spend our time first talking about the content of the course, and our recommended course is our Cortado version of our Computer Science A course. Historically, we've had some other versions, but last year—if you are brand new to Computer Science A—last year the College Board did a revamp of the entire course. And so CodeHS was able to follow up and offer some amazing updated course content that fits wonderfully with those College Board resources that you'll now see.

So, other checklist items we need to cover today: submitting your course audit to the College Board, making sure you understand the dates that are required by the College Board so that your students can sit for the exam in May. Then we'll get into the huge amount of CodeHS resources and curriculum and extra practice and great classroom engagement opportunities we have for your students as they prep this entire school year for the CSA exam. And we will of course give you an overview of the exam itself and how your students can best be prepared.

So, just a quick note: this is an updated policy for our webinars. To get a certificate of completion for your time here today, we do require live attendance. We are fine with your AI notetakers, but please make sure they are muted and the chat is disabled on those so that we're not filling up the chat too much. But we would love to ask you to participate today. We don't want your questions to get lost, however. So, if you are going to ask a question today, we ask that you put that question in the Q&A. The chat can be reserved for observations and celebrations and hints and tips and tricks, all things CSA, but we don't want to lose the questions in that great collaboration environment we're hoping to build today. So, please go ahead and use the Q&A for your questions, and then they won't get lost.

So, if you are new to not only Computer Science A and this course, but also CodeHS, we would welcome you to go ahead and sign up for an account. And Steve has dropped a link in the chat so that you can create your free teacher account in order to access these fantastic curricular resources for this course. You need an account, and your students will need accounts, but they're free, and that's the good news. And so, once you set up your teacher account, you are able to copy that Cortado CodeHS course to help your students prepare and set up as many sections according to your bell schedule and add as many students as you would like for free.

So, while you are doing that or getting logged in to CodeHS, if you already have a CodeHS account and you want to just take a moment for a refresher on the different tools and resources available, go ahead and sign into your account, have that pulled up, and maybe put the Zoom side by side if you have the screen real estate so that you can follow along with us here today and you can just build that muscle memory and check out as we do all the resources available.

If you are new to CodeHS, we are a completely web-based curriculum for K-12 computer science teaching and learning, and we offer a lot of LMS features that you might be familiar with that enable you to communicate with students, to provide feedback on their work, and to grade their work, and also access to so much great curriculum—not just for Computer Science A, but for Computer Science Principles and intro-level computer science classes, or cybersecurity, which is a huge push right now in many schools across the country. So, we love to offer our curriculum free to teachers and students. It is such high quality instructional materials and a great opportunity for your students to practice and get tons of opportunities to learn and build their skills step by step in all topics of computer science.

So, we're going to start off our webinar today with a little Q&A, a lightning round for Steve here, and we're going to see if he can come up with some great answers on the fly here specific to CSA. So, Steve, lightning round. What's the one resource that saved you the most time in your first year teaching CSA?

All right. Well, I'm going to cheat and give two, and one's a pro resource, one's a free resource. So, the pro resource—and if you are a free CodeHS teacher, you do have access to the first five of these—the lesson plans were fantastic. I taught computer science for 11 years before coming to CodeHS, but I did not teach CSA until I think my eighth year, and I came from teaching ELA. So, coming to computer science was new for me, but I had gotten used to web design, Python, and JavaScript. And then when I first started teaching APCSA in Java, it was like my first year teaching again, and I was just like, what is happening? But the lesson plans were such a good resource for me to see how to pace things, see misconceptions, get discussion questions, and just as I was learning everything for the first time, the lesson plans were a great resource because it helped me kind of think of those supplemental ways to make the content engaging. And there are problem guides for some of the exercises that are super helpful, so I would say that one. But as a free resource, the Question of the Day also saved me a lot of time because it gave me built-in AP practice every day that I didn't have to create on my own or think about how I was going to fit it in. So, your students can access our AP Question of the Day on their own. You can see how they do. You can do it as a do first. That's what I always used to do—the do first when they came in. But that just saved me a lot of time for knowing they were getting multiple choice practice every day through that, and it matches where you should be at in the curriculum, too. So, I would say those two.

Yeah, they're great bell ringers. Carlos has used those too from our curriculum. So, lesson plans and Question of the Day, and we will show you where both of those are later in our time together. But this is a lightning round, so let's keep going. What's your favorite CSA resource as a teacher, Steve?

Okay, so when I taught CSA, it was still the old framework, so this was not in the course that I used, but I wish it was. The Cortado course is the only course in our catalog that has an exploration activity type where you have built-in PRIMM—Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify—questions built into the activity. I love those explorations. I think they are such a great self-contained lesson for making sure students are doing the thinking that we know is important for them to succeed on the APCSA exam. So, you'll find those in every single lesson, but again, our Cortado course is the only place they exist on our platform, and I think they are my favorite CSA resource by far. Not by far, because there are a lot of other good ones too, but I really like the PRIMM explorations.

Yeah, I love that you bring that up. It's a great example of our curriculum team really embedding a fantastic pedagogical practice into the curriculum so teachers don't have to build it; it's already there. And if you are not familiar with PRIMM, happy to answer questions about it—just throw a question in the chat if you would like to know more about that pedagogical CS practice.

All right, let me keep going in our lightning round. Steve, what's one thing you got wrong your first year teaching CSA, and now you would do completely differently?

Well, yeah, this is where the lightning round could get very long very quickly because there were a lot of things I was thinking of here. But my first year I was using CodeHS, and particularly with CSA too, I did not use the examples in the lesson nearly enough. There are the ones where the code is already there. I was learning something new for the first time, and I had the intuition, oh, let me just click through these, we'll get to the exercises. But the examples, I think, are some of the most useful parts of the lesson. It's where you have pre-written code that you can kind of break, you can talk about misconceptions, and the lesson plans have suggestions for using those. But I did not use those examples nearly enough my first year teaching, and I'm glad I learned from my mistakes and used those more for kind of guided practice moving forward.

Yeah, it goes right back to that PRIMM model, right? The really philosophical practice or thought behind the PRIMM model is that students should be reading expert-written code, predicting the output, and really being able to talk about the code and what it does. And so those example exercises are exactly that: they are fully coded, functioning programs, and students should not skip over those. They are so useful in a lot of different ways in the classroom.

All right, what's one misconception you think new APCSA teachers might have, Steve?

All right, so I know I had this one, and it was coming from my ELA background and other classes. I was an AP coordinator, so I knew how AP exams worked. But with the FRQs, when I first looked at APCSA FRQs, I was like, these are intense. There is a lot going on here; there's a lot that students have to do. And one thing that's super important to remember is that students do get partial credit. If they can do a couple things right in that FRQ, they do get partial credit. So, they can earn a few of the points for knowing how to declare a class, knowing how to make instance variables private, knowing how to do a constructor public—knowing how to do those basic things earns them points on the FRQs. And so the process is super important even if students don't necessarily know exactly what the FRQ is going to look like when they first read the prompt. Learning how to start that process of, all right, how do I set up the class and going from there, and what points can I get first—I think it took me a while to realize that my first year. Especially my first year, the first time looking at those FRQs, you're just like, we've got to get all seven points, how do we do this? But you can do very well on the exam by getting four or five, or at least telling students to focus on getting the points they know first, and then a lot of times those other points would then kind of just happen as students were planning their responses.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up FRQs because we're going to talk more about those later in the session today. And I think helping students understand the logistics of the test—these checklist items, which is our theme today—is really important because the content is one thing, but if students don't understand the basis of how the test is administered, then they can really get tripped up on exam day. So yes, we will keep checking boxes.

All right, one more lightning round question. Steve, the CSA course is pretty coding-heavy, but what kind of computer science topics more broadly—or also part B, what coding concepts in Java really engaged your students the most in the CSA course?

So the Java one, my students loved when we got to class creation because then it starts to get a little more formulaic, right? You set up your class, you do your instance variables, you do your constructor, and then you do your methods, and that's the entirety of FRQ 2 and a lot of 1 also. But I felt like my students had done a little bit of programming before they came to CSA, but class creation was when Java started feeling like Java, and they really enjoyed it on one hand because they could see the basis of how it fit into programs they use like apps and video games. But on the other hand, it was very formulaic. Once they knew how to write one class, they could take that structure and kind of easily apply it. So, I feel like that was the one in thinking of the APCSA curriculum, I always loved when we got to class creation because it was just a moment where the light bulbs kind of started to click to put those other things together.

Also just more broadly, I loved teaching conditionals and if-else statements and logic. I just think that that's so—well, that's more coding. Okay, if your CSA students needed a break from Java, what do you throw at them?

Yeah, binary numbers was always my favorite non-coding CS topic to cover. Does that work, Stephanie? But binary is just the way you think through binary as the basis of the way that computers work, store information, and present information. And so I always loved when encryption and cybersecurity—those things—because binary is the basis of encryption methods like Caesar ciphers, and you kind of get to that, and so I love getting to throw in encryption as a topic. It's just a lot of fun because I love puzzles, so anytime we got to do that, I feel like binary numbers and encryption fell in that bucket, and anytime I got to do that in my class, I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, I get that. I get that. One for me—I'll throw one out there—it was so eye-opening to me when I learned the efficiency difference between a linear search algorithm and a binary search algorithm. So, yes, there are definitely coding-tangential topics that we can throw in there and still keep the logic mindset, the engineering mindset alive for our students, even if we need to take a break from Java for a little bit.

All right. So, the first thing on our checklist is our Cortado course content and pacing that course. So, we're going to put links in the chat to the course overview page and also the course syllabus, and you can check those out at your leisure. Thank you, Steve, for putting those in the chat. Definitely some important information on that course overview page. You are going to find not only short descriptions of each module or unit—we use those terms interchangeably here at CodeHS—but you'll also find a quick preview of some things that students will be able to build as they're working through this course. So, for example, we've got this Rock, Paper, Scissors game. So, I'm going to click run, and we'll say three rounds to win. I'm going to choose rock, and I win this round—the computer chose scissors. So, let me choose paper this time, and I win. And so, let's see, it's two to zero; can I go for three? Let me choose paper again. Ah, the computer got me that time. But you can see who wouldn't have fun coding this very well-known game? So, you can check out those demo programs there. You can also see some other additional resources we're going to go over today and see our alignment to various exams and certifications.

And of course, we are 100% aligned to the College Board's APCSA framework, so definitely check that out. You can find the syllabus here also for a little bit more detail on what's in each module.

We'll keep going here and talk about the College Board units. So, previously there were a ton of units in this course, and with this rewrite that happened for the 2025–2026 school year, and obviously moving into the 2026–2027 school year, the College Board simplified the course into four units. And sadly for a lot of teachers, I hear inheritance was removed. How do you feel about that, Steve?

I mean, it's a pretty fundamental part of Java, but if it's not on the exam, then yeah, I was fine with removing it if it also got removed from the exam, because then I felt like I was glad for this new stuff they added. And we do still have it as a supplemental unit that you can add after.

It sounded like teachers had so much fun teaching it.

It is a fun thing to talk about, and you very much get into the meat of programming that way. So, it's a cool topic, but it is still supplemental and can be added after you're done with the course.

Awesome, good to know. We'll show everybody where you can find that additional content in our curated list of additional topics. But they got rid of inheritance, and text files and data sets have been added—also very important computer science concepts. So, we followed along with that College Board guidance.

Here are those curated supplemental modules, and once we flip over to the CodeHS platform, we'll definitely show you the workflow for how to get those assigned to your courses and your sections. But before we move over, I do want to share some important AP College Board dates.

So, this month you should be creating your class sections on College Board. That is a completely separate platform from CodeHS, but all students do need to join AP Classroom. Preferred registration date for the exam is October 2nd. And then teachers, you need to have your course audit filed by October 15th, and submitting your course audit materials by January 31st. This year—well, I guess technically next year, in 2027—the APCSA exam is on Wednesday, May 12th.

All right. So those dates are for you, the teacher. Some additional help around planning and pacing: the College Board CED has pacing suggestions for units at a glance. So, if you're thinking about your entire school year, because we're at the beginning, and how much time you need to allot for each of the topics that the College Board has laid out, they are suggesting the following days or class meetings for your students, and our syllabus reflects those suggestions. You can kind of see how we line up and stack up with the College Board suggestions.

We do also provide some of the College Board labs on the CodeHS platform, and you can find out more about when to administer those at the link on this page. Steve, could I ask you to put that College Board Labs link in the chat? You'll want to make sure that with those labs, they're projects, right? They're sort of fun things for students to build, but they will need some skills in order to successfully complete those coding projects, so you don't want to introduce them too early. Definitely use that link in the chat. That will help you correlate which of the College Board labs works with each of the units and students' readiness levels for those labs.

Also, Steve made a wonderful interactive pacing guide for CSA, so we'll put that in the chat also. Basically what you can do is open up this pacing guide, enter your schedule like 45 minutes a day or a block schedule, and then you can see which lessons from the CodeHS Cortado course you should be teaching on which days. So, if you have a 45-minute schedule, that will help you, and you can even see how a lesson might have to stretch, because some of these lessons are quite extensive and long and will take your students more than one 45-minute class period for sure.

So, we hope that's useful to you. We've already given you a link to the syllabus, but just a reminder to check that out, and then a direct link to the labs. Steve got that in the chat already, and again, these are additional practice and additional ways to engage your students in building something like a game or an app that they might already be familiar with—just really motivating for students so that they can see their own progression in their Java skills and knowledge.

So, the College Board does require a minimum of 20 hours of hands-on lab experience, and there are three APCSA labs available on AP Central as exemplars to support implementation of at least those 20 hours. But we've included several in that mapping document. And so, we'll take a look over here, and then Steve, I'm going to ask you which ones your students liked the most. So, a lot of these, like we said, are included in the College Board, and we've kind of mirrored them here on CodeHS so your students don't have to go to the College Board site to do them. But Steve, which ones did your students enjoy?

As somebody who can still name all original 151 Pokemon, I love the Pokemon Simulation Lab, and so did my students, because it was a fun external interest that we could bring into the classroom and get to talk about. So, any of the Pokemon ones were very fun to do. I also always love a good Mad Libs lab; I think it's just such a great way of reinforcing variables and user input—just such an easy way for students to pick up on, oh, okay, I named this variable, that user input goes in there, now I'm going to use the variable, and the value comes out. So, I always loved that lab. My students liked it, too, because they could get a little creative. Again, my background is creative writing, so I love a good Mad Libs story. All of them are great, but those two are the ones that I still think about. Battleship and Blackjack are great, too, because your students are familiar with the games, and it's fun to see a coded version of that as well.

Yeah, I think that's really what stands out to me about these labs: they will likely be games or themes that students are already familiar with, and so it's just so exciting for them to be able to create that in the code that they're learning.

All right, anything course content-wise, Steve, that you want to add before we jump into the course audit process with the College Board?

I'll say one thing with pacing that I really always appreciated about teaching APCSA in both the old framework and the new framework, but I think even more so in the new framework: what I loved about teaching APCSA compared to maybe some other AP classes is it's a lot of information, but once you learn a piece of information, you're going to keep using it. So when you learn iteration for the first time, it's not like iteration is something that then never comes back until the exam. Once you learn how to use for loops, you're going to be using for loops in your programs all the time. And so even if Unit 4 in the new framework is the longest unit—it certainly has the most content to it—teachers might look at it and be like, oh no, how am I going to get through all this stuff in Unit 4? Unit 4 will use everything that you've covered in the first three units again. So I always felt like when I was teaching, okay, if I need to reinforce this concept, it's going to come back when I get to the later units—they're going to use conditionals again, they're going to use loops, it's just now going to be traversing arrays and ArrayLists and 2D arrays. So I would say that would be my advice: Unit 4 is the biggest unit where most of the exam comes from, but that's also because it reuses a lot of the concepts as well.

Love that. And Steve, you had mentioned earlier that most or all of your students had at least some previous coding experience before they attempted CSA. Do you think that's kind of the general recommendation?

Yeah. So, there is no prerequisite from College Board for APCSA other than that they've done Algebra 1, but I do think the more programming experience they can have going in, the better. Java is a wonderful language, but it is a very technical one. My students did Python before and then were able to apply the concepts that they saw, but now to Java. So I do think if there's a way to vertically align and have some classes leading into APCSA, it's just going to help because it's more exposure for sure.

Yeah, and that's what made me think of the question, because you were saying they use loops over and over and over once they've learned it. A Python loop looks different, but works the same way as a Java loop, right? So if they can bring even some Scratch block coding experience with them, those concepts carry even from block coding languages up to text-based coding languages.

All right, so submitting a course audit: your course must be authorized by College Board in order to gain access or keep access to materials in AP Classroom, such as practice tests. And so, the way to do that is through submitting your AP course audit. CodeHS is an endorsed provider for CSA, and so when you go to do this process, you can just select the CodeHS syllabus for your course audit; you do not have to come up with one on your own.

I know if you were a new CSA teacher or had never done a course audit, we have some extra guidance for you, but if you have previously taught CSA, then your administrator can just renew your course for you. So, that would be you having a conversation with your district testing coordinator if you previously taught CSA and just need them to authorize and renew your course.

Thank you, Steve, for putting that link in the chat. So, if submitting this paperwork is something that you're nervous about, ask questions in the Q&A. Steve's done it before, and Carlos has for AP CS Principles, so we can definitely answer your questions about those College Board requirements.

All right, so now we're ready to take a deep dive into the Cortado course and all the exam review materials we have available for you and your students. We are ready to actually jump into the platform and take a look at some of these awesome resources. The first thing that you're going to want to do if you have never used CodeHS before is create a copy of the Cortado course. I'm not going to go through all the steps for you, but just really quickly: if you go to your left-hand navigation—if you're a new user, most teachers' workflows kind of stem out of this left-hand navigation, which has all the essential apps that you need—under the Assignments toolbox in the left-hand navigation, click on Courses, and then click this Create New Course button. This is where you'll be able to choose the Cortado course. You can just type in "Cortado", click this button, and give your course a name. I usually just use my last name and APCSA or something like that.

If you're following along building some muscle memory right now with us, you could name it Test or Demo so you don't have to worry about messing something up for your students. But once you've created this copy of our Cortado course, you're going to want to create as many sections of it as you need. The course is the materials; sections are your bell schedule, how you're going to organize your students' access to the course. And so clicking over in the left-hand navigation into the Classroom toolbox and clicking Sections will bring you to this page where you have a button that says Create New Section. If you're going to teach three periods of Computer Science A, you're going to click that button three times and name it after your bell schedule. I taught on a block schedule where we had gray days and maroon days, so maybe I have a Gray A1, a Gray A3, and a Maroon A5. The sections are your bell schedule.

Once you have those set up, then you need students, right? When you click into a section, you'll be brought to your roster, and clicking on the Invite tab in the center of your screen will give you a unique class code that you can then give to your students. So, if you use Google Classroom or whatever LMS you use, or however you get a link or email to students, they just need this code, and when they click on it, they will be prompted to create a student account, and it will automatically be attached to this section on your teacher side. Again, as we said at the top of the hour, you can create as many sections with as many students as you need to.

Clicking back on the roster main page, I can see that I have some students doing some great work in my Cortado course. There are lots of options for communicating with students here, adjusting their settings, and answering their questions—lots of great tools from this roster page.

What I want to take a look at, because we promised you we would show you where to find those curated supplemental materials and your lesson plans, is the Assignments app. From the roster page, you can click on this icon, or if you've navigated somewhere else, that's fine—just open the Assignments toolbox in the left-hand navigation and click on the Assignments app. This is your teacher side of things; this is where you find your lesson plans, and you can preview what your students are going to work on.

You can see that some of these lessons are really long—probably the longest lessons in our curriculum. And so if you have a Pro plan and you have access to the lesson plans, those are going to be really useful to help you find those natural break points so that you know where to divvy things up depending on your bell schedule. These maroon documents will take you to your lesson plans.

Another place to find lesson plans is in this horizontal navigation in the Materials tab. I like this Materials tab view because you also have access to your course syllabus, and you can really quickly see the handouts that our curriculum team has built for each lesson, along with that preview of what your students will be working through on their side.

Our lesson plans are full of amazing information and are all set up the same way: we give you student-facing objectives, access to the student materials that they see when they log in, and access to the solutions. Even more detailed than solutions are the problem guides. Love problem guides; they have a lot of additional context and information besides just the code answers.

Vocabulary is here. If your students are new to computer science, I think focusing on vocabulary—and I say this as a former language teacher, so of course I'm a little bit biased—is an integral part of any subject matter. So vocabulary here for your students, those handouts again, and then the planning notes and your activities are going to be where you can find those natural breaks for these rather long lessons.

Then we also have the slide decks students will encounter. So, if you want to teach from those or make edits to those, you have access to them. And then Steve mentioned a warm-up/bell ringer—do-now and do-first are the two that are the most ingrained in my memory. So, if you are in the routine of doing bell ringers or exit tickets, we've got suggested questions and example answers here in the Discussion Questions area, along with modifications for students who are really taking to computer science and want more, as well as students who might need a little bit of additional support. Finally, we finish with standards. So, that's lesson plans in a nutshell—available again in the Materials section.

Let's go back to the Assignments page because I promised you that there's more content to be had. If you scroll all the way down to the end of your assignments, this Search for Content button will lead you to those curated projects and curated extensions for your CSA students. We even have midterms, finals, and practice tests—just a lot of different great content to help you engage and challenge your students in all the right ways.

So, that's the basic curriculum; now we're ready for the add-ons. Before I do that, Steve, anything you want to say about the basic Cortado course before we move on to the extras in our APCSA hub?

Yeah, I love the Cortado course; it's one of my favorite courses I've gotten to play around with. I especially love the exploration activities that you'll see in each lesson—I think they are just absolutely fantastic. They're like an entire self-contained I-do, we-do, you-do lesson structure. In each lesson, you should be able to find those explorations. Every single lesson has at least one. Those, I think, are my favorite activities on the CodeHS platform, so I would definitely recommend highlighting those activities as great ones to do with your class, because there's prediction, questions, investigating, and they have to extend the program, with autograders for that. I cannot recommend the explorations enough as a resource in your APCSA class.

Be on the lookout for those labeled "Exploration". Now, Steve, tell me a little bit about how you would approach grading those. In other webinars and PLCs for CSA, I've had some teachers ask: would you grade every single exploration and every single detail, or what would be your general strategy?

What I would do with the explorations is look at the autograder part first. The autograder checks the last part where they modify and extend the program in some way—maybe they have to add another if-statement, or in this one, check that they've added one more print statement that includes the word "programming". So that would be what they have to do to pass it. But then what I would do if I was taking this for a grade is look at that `investigate.txt` file and check out their answers for how they explore the syntax in the program. This one is where they're first learning `print`, so I might make this part of the grade, too, set it to Teacher Grade, and go look at it in my Fast Grade queue to see them all at once. That's how I would approach these, but whatever works for your schedule. You could also do these `investigate.txt` questions together as guided practice—it's a great way to bring discourse and discussion into your class: "Hey, take a minute, answer Question 1, turn to your neighbor, and compare findings." The autograder checks the coding part, but you have these text files with built-in questions that really put the thinking on the students. I would either do these together as a class or make it something I looked at later to hold them accountable for answering the questions thoughtfully.

I love that. So, this is the part where we have an autograder and can use this Check Code button to get some feedback about our code, and then in the `investigate.txt` file, you're going to have to do a little more digging, but I love that idea of a think-pair-share or getting students to use that academic vocabulary.

All right, so more to come on the extras outside of the main Cortado course. The first thing we want to show you is the AP Hub. Over in the left-hand navigation, I've opened the Curriculum toolbox, and down towards the bottom is our AP Hub. There are tons of resources here for both APCSA and APCSP, but we'll focus on APCSA today.

Question of the Day is something Steve brought up earlier as a bell ringer. You can have students set it up so they get an email reminder each day of the Question of the Day. What it is is a quick multiple-choice question that follows along with the pacing of the curriculum, so they get more difficult and complex as the year progresses. But students love these because they can get streaks for attempting the questions each day, and you can also see your students' responses and use that as a formative assessment on what students have down versus what you might want to linger on and review.

We also do have a textbook. It is not yet updated to reflect the new College Board layout, but all the content is still there, so you might have to filter through, but the textbook is a great place to direct students for additional help. We've got those AP labs, and in the project catalog, we've got a few. If you like these, you can assign them from here: just click into it, click this green Assign button, and it will allow you to select which sections or even specific students to assign extra and engaging work to.

The other thing that we want to talk about besides Question of the Day is the FRQ Center. Steve was talking at the top of the hour about these intimidating, open-ended free response questions, and we don't want students' first encounter with those to be test day. Steve, do you want to talk a little bit about the FRQs and how you used them with your students?

Yeah. One thing with the Cortado course is there are at least three sample FRQs in every unit, because the mid-unit assessment has one and the end-of-unit exam has two. Those ones are curated to what they know at that exact moment in time. But then the FRQ Center is where they can get additional practice on FRQs, featuring the publicly released ones from previous exams.

I loved working in FRQs. I love the way the Cortado framework is now because they'll get FRQ practice all year, but I always loved doing FRQs periodically—I would do "FRQ Fridays" for alliterative purposes. The FRQ Center has the scoring guides built in, so once students did the FRQ, they would go to the scoring guide. I'd have them grade a partner's work so they got to look at someone else's code and really start to think, oh, okay, maybe they solved it in a different way than I did, but I can see how they would still earn the point.

The scoring guides are so important to have your students explore because they can get partial credit on the APCSA FRQs. I always made the analogy that you win a basketball game by making layups, right? You want to get the best shots you can, so those early points on the FRQs are the layups. You're not going to be able to get points 6 and 7 if you're also not getting points 1 and 2. Focusing on getting those done first, and using the scoring guide, really helps lay it out for them. You can assign the FRQs directly from the FRQ Center to your class, have students solve them, give them the amount of time they would have for one on the exam—which is four in an hour and a half, so roughly 22 minutes—and then have them trade with a scoring guideline and talk about it together as a class. It would be about a 45-minute procedure, and it was a fun thing to do throughout the year so by the time they get to the exam, they know the process.

I love that. To reiterate the distinction: these FRQs are outside of the regular curriculum, but we did make an update at teacher request for the Cortado course so that FRQs are embedded in the course itself. You can find those mid-unit and end-of-unit assessments at the end of units with FRQ practice embedded, appropriate for the content and skills that students have at that moment.

And a direct quote from one of my students was that they thought the APCSA FRQs were "just CodeHS exercises" because throughout the course, when they're doing those exercises, they're really doing little mini-FRQs. All the FRQs require writing one method that traverses a 2D array, and in pretty much every single 2D array exercise in our course, they're going to traverse a 2D array. So even the exercises in general, even if they're not labeled FRQ, give them the same type of practice and required thinking.

Students get four questions in 90 minutes on the exam, so you're looking at roughly 22.5 minutes per question. That's a lot of work for students, and it's also a lot of work for you, the teacher, to give them feedback. We've got these scoring guides that students can sit with and reflect on—both worked examples and their own practice examples—to see why an answer would score a certain way. But that's so much work. It's essential work for students to do and reflect on, but for you, the teacher, you want to maximize FRQ practice without being completely overwhelmed with grading. One thing we've also done at teacher request is provide some AI grading guidance for the FRQ Center practices. We know this practice is essential for student success on the exam, but individualized grading of all of it could be a waterfall of work for you. So, we have created AI grading tools that can help you be more efficient as you're providing students with feedback about those FRQs.

One last additional resource for you: the Practice area in CodeHS is a curated list of coding practice problems that can provide additional student help. You can find those in a couple of places—both in the AP Hub in the top navigation of the site, and students can find it on their view of the CodeHS homepage if they want to work with additional practice challenges.

All right, last thing on our checklist for today: exam overview and prep. On exam day, there are two parts:
- **Section I:** Multiple Choice — 42 questions in 1 hour and 30 minutes.
- **Section II:** Free Response — 4 questions in 1 hour and 30 minutes.

You know in advance generally what coding concepts are going to be covered in those FRQs, so it's important that your students have lots of practice with all of those.

The review course is 20 hours, has its own review page, and has its own syllabus. It gives you and your students the opportunity to take some time and reflect at the end of the year before the exam on all the learning that they've done, checking each box of the content that's going to come up on the exam and building student confidence with that material. Definitely check out the practice exams and review problems available. All of our content also complements what you'll find on AP Classroom, where the College Board also provides students with opportunities for practice and review.

Here are your key dates once again:
- Make sure students are enrolled by November 13th.
- Submit your course audit by January 31st.
- We suggest that by mid-April you have finished teaching the Cortado course, leaving a couple of weeks for review and exam preparation.
- May 12th, 2027 is the official APCSA exam date.

For our last lightning round question: Steve, what's one way CodeHS made your CSA teaching easier?

I just love the ways that difficult programming topics are presented in such relatable and digestible ways. For example, text files is one of the new things that got added to the Cortado course. When I was looking at it, the exercise where they introduce it involves a karaoke setup where it reads in lyrics to one of the students' favorite songs. I think that's such an easy, relatable way to understand how text files work and read in lines one by one. You'll find that throughout the course—the way it relates topics in ways that students understand the thinking behind it makes it fun and makes teaching a lot easier.

Now it is time for our wrap-up. If you need more help after today, your resources are going to be the Knowledge Base or our Support Team on the platform. If you would like to learn more about Computer Science A, we did an hour-and-a-half webinar over the summer that you can watch at codehs.com/webinars. We also have a CSA Facebook group you can join, and you can become a certified educator or earn micro-credentials with us.

Please fill out our webinar survey so that we can get better and make sure we're covering the information that is essential for you as a classroom teacher. We will upload attendance from Zoom to our CodeHS site, and a certificate of completion will be automatically emailed to you within 48 hours. If you are looking for more PD, we will be talking Computer Science Principles next week, AI the week after that, and Cybersecurity after that. Thank you so much for being here today, and good luck this school year with your AP students!