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Home > Teaching Tips and Strategies
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Teaching Tips and Strategies
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| | The following tips and suggestions were provided by the Chief Faculty Consultant for AP Computer Science and by a former AP CS teacher who was a Reader/Question Leader from 1993 to 2001 and who also served as a College Board consultant from 1996 to 2001. Others were taken from the Teacher's Guide -- AP Computer Science.
- Use the GridWorld Case Study throughout the whole course. This case study has five parts. Parts 1 and 2 can be started very early in the course and you may integrate the remaining case study materials into your course as you see fit. The case study provides a good example of a program of significant length. The narrative discusses the development of this program and provides programming exercises and "Do You Know" questions. Several AB topics, particularly analysis of algorithms and alternate data structures such as two-dimensional arrays and linked lists can be introduced using the GridWorld Case Study.
- Practice writing programs and review questions. Use the sample free-response questions from the Course Description to give students experience with this type of question. Help students learn to recognize key phrases in the wording of questions so they interpret and answer them correctly.
- Join the AP discussion group. Teaching ideas, concept clarifications, and the current state and future directions of computer science are discussed daily. New teachers and experienced teachers, both high school and college, all present problems and solutions in this forum. Whether you actively participate or just observe the postings you will grow in your understanding of computer science and its good teaching practices.
- Emphasize Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) throughout the year in both A and AB level classes. Begin the course by presenting students with mostly complete programs and allowing students to complete small portions of them. As the student's knowledge grows, increase the amount of work the student is required to complete in the project. Within a relatively short time students will construct complete solutions on their own. By modeling good OOP design in the early projects, you teach the students to create good solution structures and prepare them for success in the field of computer science.
- Grade student projects using the AP Computer Science grading process. Before assigning a lab, identify the specific parts of the program solution and assign proportional amounts of credit for the completion of those parts. Give credit for documentation and proper design in addition to credit for a completely correct solution. Refer to the sample design question in the Course Description.
- Assign meaningful projects. Pick problems based in everyday reality and encourage the students to solve them using their knowledge of computer science. As the year goes on, divide the class into programming groups. Take a larger project and have the class discuss a solution to the project. Define the solution to the project, being very specific about the preconditions and postconditions. Then make each programming group responsible for writing the code for some appropriate portion of the project. Finally, combine the results from all of the groups and view the results. Let the students identify strengths and weaknesses of this process. Consider basing part of a student's grade on his or her specific contribution to the solution, and part on the success of the entire group.
- Use your textbook as a guide to the study of computer science, but keep the AP CS Course Description, particularly the Topic Outline and the Java subsets in sight at all times. Regardless of the textbook chosen, it will be necessary to modify the content and the order of presentation to meet the complete AP CS Course requirements. Use the sample questions from the Course Description and the excellent review books that are commercially available. Give the students constant feedback on their work using higher-level questions. Refer to the Topic Outline and Java Subsets regularly to insure that you are covering the testable material.
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