Introduction to Teacher Guide

Moved from U1 topic page --MF, 6/12/20

Throughout the unit, students learn to "package" a script by building a custom block (procedure) and how to add input parameters. This is the beginning of a yearlong focus on abstraction. The unit also introduces the design elements of the curriculum itself: Green boxes ("For You To Do") are for exercises; orange boxes are important text that even text-skippers should read; yellow boxes are for text that students can safely skip, but that point to side paths or reinforce the main points. Blue boxes ("If There Is Time") are additional exercises that are useful, not simply redundant, but that can be skipped without leaving students unprepared for later pages. It's up to you to decide which of these to assign to the class. Purple boxes ("Take It Further") are differentiated learning for the fastest and most interested students; our intention is that they be self-assigned, not assigned by you to the entire class. They have little handholding and can take quite a long time. Encourage individual students to do them at home. The pink boxes at the top of lab pages give very short overviews, for students, of the plan of the entire lab and of the individual page. Don't dwell on these, but certain students' learning styles will benefit from advance notice of what they're working toward on a page. Grey boxes (we chose the neutral color deliberately as a subtle hint that these aren't part of the beauty and joy we strive for elsewhere) are for AP exam vocabulary words. Encourage students not to spend time reading them in class, but to come back to them for vocabulary review. Please resist any temptation to make a big fuss about vocabulary.

Encourage students to experiment with Snap!: playing with inputs, trying out blocks before they have been formally introduced, and modifying and extending the assigned tasks. Creativity is a Big Idea of AP CS Principles and a core element of BJC.

Welcome to the Teacher Guide for the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course. This guide is designed to support high school CSP teachers with timing and activities for the BJC student materials. We start this guide by presenting our three goals: including student groups typically underrepresented in computing, preparing students to pass the AP CS Principles exam, and conveying the beauty and joy that we see in computer science.

Goals: Equity and Inclusion

A primary goal of the BJC curriculum is to attract new students, especially those traditionally underrepresented in computer science, to the joys and life opportunities that come with programming and CS through rigorous, accessible, and enjoyable content. BJC aims to foster the engagement of diverse students through project-based learning activities, opportunities for personalization, and discussions of the social implications of computing.

Computer Scientists @ Work curriculum elements are designed to support students' sense of belonging by representing diverse individuals in the field. Each box highlights a different individual and their contribution to computer science and includes an additional link where students can learn more about the individual and their work. This curriculum feature also serves to educate all students about the contributions of diverse individuals and some of the challenges these individuals have faced.

Goals: AP Computer Science Principles

Several curricula satisfy the framework for the new (starting 2020-2021) AP CS Principles exam. BJC is one. Most AP courses have specific curricula taught in similar ways at every high school where they are offered. CS Principles is different because it is equivalent to a college breadth course rather than a first course for CS majors, and there is no uniformity in how colleges teach such a course. In particular, the exam is meant to be "language agnostic," meaning that any programming language can be used in the AP CSP course.

Like BJC, CSP's specific goal is to attract students in groups that are historically underrepresented in computer science. BJC is an AP curriculum for tactical reasons: it's much easier to get high schools across the country to introduce an AP course than a non-AP course. But keep in mind that the goal is to attract students who may not view themselves as "AP kids."

The College Board CSP Framework sets minimum standards for each of the "Big Ideas" and "Computational Thinking Practices" listed to the right, but each curriculum has its own emphasis. BJC puts a heavy emphasis on Algorithms and Programming and the Impact of Computing. As an AP-endorsed curriculum, we cover every detail of the Framework, but no CSP curriculum follows the order of topics listed in the Framework. Instead, many Framework topics are spread throughout BJC. In this Teacher Guide, there is a teacher page for each student lab, and the last thing on each teacher page is a list of which Skills of the Computational Thinking Practices, Learning Objectives, and Essential Knowledge are found in that lab. A description of how each unit addresses the Big Ideas and the Skills of the Computational Thinking Practices is included on the Teacher Guide page for each of the first five units (Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3, Practice Create Task, Unit 4, Unit 5). Please note that the BJC Teacher Guide should be considered a support and that the official AP CSP Curriculum Framework is the definitive source of information about the standards, performance tasks, exam, and requirements of the course.

Goals: Beauty and Joy

In addition to the AP goals and curriculum framework, BJC has one more goal: for students to come away loving programming and wanting to do more of it. This doesn't mean they all have to be professional programmers or computer science majors. But everyone on the BJC team has had the experience of learning to love programming. As teachers, we've seen kids who hate school turned around by discovering programming.

Most of us started by seeing computer programs as a means to an end. Our focus was on the result of running the program, rather than on the program itself. We came to see programs as potentially beautiful in themselves when we learned the technique of recursion, in which a procedure calls itself as a subprocedure. So, starting right in Unit 1, we sneak simple examples of recursion into the labs. We don't make a fuss about them, and it's not until Unit 7 (after the AP exam) that we make a serious formal presentation of the idea.

"Beauty and Joy" isn't just poetry. We want the class to be a joyous experience for students. We want to make it hard for any student to feel like a failure. So we offer built-in differentiated instruction, in the form of "hints" that are not shown initially, but with a link that a student can choose to click in order to get a more scaffolded activity. (As always, in a heterogeneous class, we don't want to limit the activities to what the weakest student needs; we think most students will prefer to skip the hints once they see that they can do the work without them. Also, we have multiple-choice review questions, often mirroring the kind of question they'll see on the AP exam, but in our questions, if a student gives an incorrect answer they get a response with a hint about why that answer can't work, and they can try again as often as they need until they get it right.

Please help us achieve this goal: Do not mingle assessment activities with learning activities! At the end of each unit, we provide assessment activities. If you can't stand waiting a month to assess students, make Friday quiz day. But don't grade the labs, and don't give daily quizzes. The learning should be low-pressure; it's hard to learn when you're afraid.

A Typical BJC Class Day

First five minutes: Computing in the News. You or a student read one or two stories from today's paper about computing in society. No discussion.

Rest of class: Students work on the lab. You go around the room helping individuals.

Bell rings: Nobody wants to leave. But you sadly remind them that other students are waiting to use the room.

Pacing

Teaching any curriculum for the first time takes a lot more time and effort than repeated teaching of the same curriculum. Unanticipated events (snow-days, absences, school issues) can also interfere with any teacher's schedule.

To help you make decisions when pacing gets difficult, the Teacher Guide marks some pages with an asterisk. While all of the BJC pages (except for "Optional Projects" at the end of each unit) are part of the essence of BJC (all part of learning the beauty, the joy, and the computing) if you must adjust your schedule, these are the pages that are safe to skip (safe, in that students will still be able to do later pages and will still be safe for the AP).

Units 1 through 5 cover the basic AP content and therefore must be finished before the AP exam. Units 6-8 expand on some of the beautiful and powerful ideas of computer science that are rarely if ever seen in other AP CSP courses.

Please do not stand in front of the room talking! Teachers, especially good teachers, feel that they're not doing their job if they don't make handouts and lecture slides for each class meeting. In BJC, the curriculum itself does that kind of teaching. Your job is to walk around the room, look over shoulders, and get kids unstuck, preferably by asking questions rather than by suggesting code. Every minute you spend in front of the room is a minute in which the class isn't learning the curriculum. This is one of the main reasons teachers have trouble completing the year of materials on time.

Student Materials:

All of the required materials for this curriculum are available online at no cost. There are the labs (at bjc.edc.org) and the textbook (at bitsbook.com/excerpts). Any computer that runs a modern browser (not Internet Explorer; Edge is fine) is fine.

This section feels outdated. --MF, 8/20/19

Labs: As a general rule of thumb, a lab should take a week, on average. BJC includes two kinds of labs:
- Programming Labs, in which students practice pair programming in snap;
- Social Implications Labs, in which students read, discuss, and write about issues of computing in society using the Blown to Bits book and various online articles. The main style of work is small group discussion.
The title "lab" is used to emphasize the laboratory style—experimentation, discussion, interaction—both in programming and in the analysis of social implications.

I think basically nothing on that page applies to BJC. -bh
Both types of labs involve classroom discussion. Read more about Facilitating a Classroom Discussion.
Laboratory work style: Most programming labs are designed to be done by students with minimal or no instruction from the teacher. Students are often not used to starting and puzzling things out on their own; they often expect that things will be explained first and they then just practice; they often expect that they are "supposed" to be able to do every problem that is assigned; and they often assume that they are expected to work alone. BJC is different. Make sure students know that working together is an important part of the class, that they can figure out a lot on their own, but that they should not be surprised or feel bad if some problems do stump them. That's completely expectable and totally fine.
Social Implications: In the social implications labs, students confront difficult issues in computing in depth. By contrast, the daily Computing in the News is a brief presentation of current events. Social Implications labs also address the College Board's requirement for “Opportunities to Investigate Computing Innovations.”

Often it's best to introduce a topic with some facts, but most of the time should be spent in small group discussions. In whole-class discussions, a few students often dominate while the rest of the class misses out, whereas in small group discussion, everyone participates. Resist the urge to lecture, as then nobody is discussing.
Journals: Considering requiring students to keep a journal, which should contain
- answers to "write down..." questions in the curriculum
- a description of every program they write: what does it do, what are the key algorithms, what new technique(s) did they learn from writing it (if any), etc.
- for every bug in their code:
  - What was the symptom?
  - What did the error turn out to be?
  - How did they find the error?
  The point of this is to encourage them to "love their bugs"; debugging code is how they learn. And sometimes the bug suggests an idea for a different interesting program. It's important to model the idea that a bug isn't shameful.
- occasional mini-essays answering a focused social implications question
Don't grade the journal! It's for them, not you.
Assignments: We recommend a minimum of 1 hour a week, ideally more, for programming and social implications work done outside of class. It's understood that school and home situations vary. In some situations even 1 hour a week may not be practical. Experiment to find the balance that works for your students. Outside-of-class work may include unit investigations, weekly assignment suggestions (reading, writing, and programming), or even lab materials (especially if done in pairs). Working outside of class provides more class time for discussion and support.
Assessments: Please do not grade the daily lab activities! They are not intended as assessments, but rather as explorations. If a student doesn't know where to begin on a lab, don't add grade anxiety to "I can't learn this" anxiety. There are unit assessments (not in the student pages), which should come about once a month.
Some labs include multiple choice, formative, ungraded "Self Checks" (suggestions on effective student feedback messages appreciated). You do not have to collect and review these. Regular projects offer plenty of opportunity for formative feedback for teachers and students, and formal exams will provide summative information.

Write more specifically about the AP exam and BJC exam.

Brian, is this a note to yourself? Can you please resolve it? --MF, 5/23/20

Computer Scientists @ Work

Computer Scientists @ Work boxes feature diverse individuals and their contributions to computer science. The example to the right is from Unit 4 Lab 2 Page 4, "Who Cares About Encryption?"

As students work through the curriculum, they will come across and read the text in the Computer Scientists @ Work boxes naturally, and you don’t necessarily have to do anything specific to support them. Should you wish to encourage students to engage further with the text and additional links, here are some options:

There are also many ways to use these features as part of a project, lesson, or lesson sequence. Keep in mind that these activities, much like the Optional Projects at the end of each unit, will take one or more class periods, and should only be used if you're on pace to complete the course content. Here are three options:

Another way to support students in seeing themselves as computer scientists is to invite speakers from a local company and/or college into your classroom. This can be done virtually or in person depending on your location and your school and district policy around classroom visitors. Consider doing some research on the comapny/insitution first and, if possible, identify a specific individual to reach out to (e.g., someone doing interesting work or of a background students can connect with) instead of reaching out to the company at large. Below is an email template you can use.

If the visit goes well, maintain the relationship in hopes of having them speak again in the future.

Design Elements

The BJC student materials have several design elements that are visually distinguished by color, each to serve a specific purpose:

Yellow boxes contain additional information for optional reading.

Students should
As much as possible, every pair should complete all For You To Do problems.
- If some problems are too much for your students, please provide feedback to the developers using the blue feedback button in the lower right corner of every page of this Teachers' Guide.
- The teacher guide suggests places where, if time is tight, you can skip problems.

Click this link to learn about hint boxes.

As a form of differentiated learning, we sometimes provide extra scaffolding for an exercise in the form of a "hint" that we expect most students not to need. Encourage students to do their best to solve a problem on their own first.
We also use this click-to-open mechanism, sometimes marked with the book icon, for extra information that's interesting but a digression from the activity. Students who read quickly will get a deeper understanding by clicking those links.

The following two boxes have hidden information. Click on the heading to expose the contents. Both are for differentiated learning.

Optional Teaching Resources

Teachers have asked us for additional activities, and teachers have also reported having trouble fitting the entire curriculum into a year.

In response to this feedback, we have created a variety of additional supports available on each unit's Teacher Guide overview page that include vocabulary activities, formative assessment questions, and AP CSP preparation prompts that support the Create Task. Nevertheless, we recommend that, except for the five minutes of Computing in the News, students spend the entire period, every class period, working on the labs. (Social Implications labs may require small discussion groups, but ideally in the programming labs, students get straight to work without your help. Your idea role is walking around the room, looking over shoulders, and dealing with question.) The BJC curriculum is paced for this class format.

In addition, this curriculum is designed to support students in finding the beauty and joy in actively doing computer science and reflecting on its social implications rather than feeling like they are jumping through hoops with worksheet and supplemental documents. We encourage teachers not to collect student lab work, either directly or through secondary forms. BJC assessment and grading occurs at the end of each unit, roughly once a month.