Category Archives: APCSP

“I love myself, my dog, and coding”

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So, I must confess that I don’t remember a time in my teaching career when the bell has rung and my students consistently groan and mumble out of displeasure.  Well, that’s exactly what’s happening in our new AP Computer Science Principles class!

These past few weeks, we’ve been working in a visual coding program called Scratch and the students LOVE it!  As a matter of fact, one of my students completed her profile in Scratch and wrote “I love myself, my dog, and coding”.  This is the same student who decided to make a Scratch project for her mom’s birthday (project below).  She was eager to share the project with me – even though it was not worth a grade or any points.

The excitement over Scratch and AP Computer Science Principles is not limited to this one student; rather, I have students chatting with me outside of class on a daily basis and asking “did you see my last project?”  Their excitement is infectious and I am impressed by their creativity and problem solving skills.

Cryptology and Encryption

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This week’s activity had students exploring cryptology with an activity to encode and decode messages using the Caesar cipher and Vignenère cipher.  Although our computers don’t use a Caesar or Vignenère cipher, this activity helped students to start thinking about security and encryption.  


Can YOU crack this ciphertext? 


Fdurqghohw


What is Caesar cipher? 


One of the earliest and simplest attempts at encryption is the Caesar cipher, employed by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC. This schema is known as a substitution cipher because it substitutes each letter of the original, unencrypted message (called the plaintext) with a corresponding letter in the final, encrypted message (called the ciphertext).
The Caesar cipher works by aligning two alphabets against one another and offsetting them by a number of positions. Caesar, himself, used a “left rotation” of three spaces, causing an a of the plaintext to align with an x in the ciphertext. (Edhesive.com)



Using Blocks to Learn about Computers

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This past week, as part of the AP Computer Science Principals class, I had my students playing with wooden blocks.  What do wooden blocks have to do with technology and computer science?  Well, the activity was designed to give students hands-on experience giving directions and acting like a computer.  


In this group exercise, students wrote and executed their first “program.”  Since most students haven’t already learned any programming languages, we used English.  And instead of executing the programs on an actual computer (which wouldn’t understand English as well as people do), the groups role-played the parts of a simulated computer as they attempted to execute the program in much the same way a real computer would run a real program.