Hello everybody! This week we'll continue working on our Final Project and say goodbye to our Seniors on Wednesday, which is their last day. If you're done with your Final Project, you can go back and work on earlier coursework to try to improve your grade. I can also issue grade corrections for previous quarters if you do work from earlier in the school year.
Seniors, thanks for taking Intro to Computer Science with me – I hope you enjoyed the course and learned a lot! Good luck with all your future endeavors, and please keep in touch.
Those of us left behind only have two more weeks after this before we take our 2nd Semester Exam on Monday, June 2nd. It'll be multiple choice and based on the Unit 7-11 Practice Quizzes. Have a great week, and let me know if you have any questions!
Hello again! I hope you're ready for a full five-day week; we haven't had one for a while.
For the rest of the school year, we'll be working on our Final Project in the course. I'm hoping you'll be able to find some inspiration from the classic video games we played last week to come up with something really fun that you can be proud of. Have a great week, and let me know if you have any questions!
Welcome back, I hope you had a great extended weekend! We're still in State Testing season, so you'll have another "late arrival" schedule:
This week, we'll wrap our work on Unit 11: 2D Lists and Board Games and begin working on our final project for the course:
Unit 11 Practice Quiz
Unit 11 Quiz
begin Unit 12: Final Project
After we get through the strange schedule this week, we should have a relatively normal schedule for the rest of the school year. As always, let me know if you have any questions, and good luck on any state tests you're taking!
Welcome to State Testing season! This week, you'll have a "late arrival" schedule due to state testing on Monday and Tuesday:
Meanwhile, we'll continue our work on Unit 11: 2D Lists and Board Games:
work on 11.2 Board Games (Battleship)
Remember, there's no school on Friday (4/18) and next Monday (4/21). Good luck on any state tests you're taking, and I hope you enjoy your short week!
Hi there! Here's the plan for this week as we tackle one of our most challenging topics to date, 2D lists:
start Unit 11: 2D Lists and Board Games
11.1 2D Lists
start 11.2 Board Games
This is our last regular week for a while – next week we'll have late arrival and shortened periods on Monday and Tuesday due to state-mandated testing for ELA (boo!), followed by a four-day weekend (yay!), followed another week of shortened periods due to state-mandated testing (boo!). Fortunately we're doing most of this unit together as a class, so we should be fine despite all the interruptions. I hope you have a great first full week of April, and as always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Hello again everyone, and welcome back from Spring Break! We only have nine more weeks of school, much of which will be broken up by extended weekends and state testing, so it should go by pretty quickly. Here's the plan as we wrap up Unit 10: Lists and Return Values:
Unit 10 Creative Task
Unit 10 Practice Quiz
Unit 10 Quiz
Next week we'll start Unit 11: 2D Lists and Board Games, which can be pretty challenging, so we'll work on those exercises together as a class. I hope you have a great week back from break, and please let me know if you have any questions!
Welcome to 4th Quarter and the last week before Spring Break! Here's the plan as we start our penultimate* unit in Intro to Computer Science, Unit 10: Lists and Return Values:
start 4th Quarter! 🍀
start Unit 10: Lists and Return Values
10.1 Lists
10.2 List methods
10.3 Return values
10.4 Unit 10 Exercises
Lists and returns are both pretty easy topics, so I hope this week flies by so you can mentally get through these next five days as quickly as possible. Thanks for all of your hard work in the first nine-elevenths of the course so far, and have a fun and relaxing Spring Break! 🩴
* look it up! :)
We've made it to the end of 3rd Quarter! After this week, we'll only have one week of classes before we all get a well-deserved week off for Spring Break. Here's the plan as we finish Unit 9: Types, Strings, and While Loops:
finish Unit 9 Creative Task
Unit 9 Review
Unit 9 Practice Quiz
Unit 9 Quiz
End of 3rd Quarter – ALL OUTSTANDING WORK IS DUE BY FRIDAY 3/14!
Please note that Friday, March 14th is an Early Release Day.
Some of you are very far behind in the course and will need to put in a lot of extra effort this week in order to earn a passing grade for 3rd Quarter. Parents, please check ProgressBook so you know what assignments your child still needs to complete.
I hope all the sunshine today offsets losing an hour this morning. Have a wonderful week, and as always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Hello again, and welcome to March! Here's the plan for this week as we begin to wrap up Unit 9: Types, Strings, and While Loops:
9.4 While Loops
9.5 Unit 9 Exercises
Unit 9 Creative Task
Next week we'll wrap up Unit 9, and that'll be the end of 3rd Quarter. Have a great week, and please let me know if you have any questions!
Welcome to the end of February! To wrap up Black History Month, I'd like to tell you about John Henry Thompson (b. 1959), the creator of the influential Lingo programming language. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Mr. Thompson got his first opportunity to work with a computer as a 10th grader at the Bronx High School of Science when his geometry teacher, Ms. Strauss, gave him early access to the math department's computer lab and helped him get his first job as a computer operator in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. After graduation, he earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Visual Studies from MIT in 1983 and continued on as a technical instructor, developed an early color pre-press design system for the Visible Language Workshop, which is now part of the MIT Media Lab. Mr. Thompson then became a project lead at Lucasfilm on the EditDroid project, an early nonlinear editing system that was a precursor to Final Cut, the industry standard in video editing. In 1987 he joined Macromedia (now part of Adobe), where he contributed to the development of a number of products, including Macromedia Director, and he invented the Lingo programming language and XObjects, which made it easier to create interactive multimedia content like Flash, Shockwave and graphics-based CD-ROMs. If you've ever played an interactive game in a web browser, his work helped make that possible! For the past two decades, Mr. Thompson has continued teaching in New York City, Philadelphia, Jamaica, and online, and he has since become an outspoken critic of social media companies such as Facebook for how they use personal data and what he describes as their negative impacts on society.
Here's the plan for this week as we continue our work in Unit 9: Types, Strings, and While Loops:
9.2 Strings
ACT – NO SCHOOL for Sophomores & Seniors; good luck, Freshmen & Juniors!
9.3 String Methods
9.4 While Loops
Good luck to the Freshmen and Juniors taking tests on Tuesday! Remember, no school for Sophomores and Seniors. After this week, we'll only have two weeks before the end of 3rd Quarter, and then another week after that will be Spring Break. Hang in there, get caught up on your missing work (as most of you need to), and have a great week! Please let me know if you have any questions at all.
Good morning! I hope you've been enjoying the winter wonderland during this three day weekend. This week I'd like to tell you about Dr. Clarence "Skip" Ellis (1943-2014), the first Black person to earn a PhD in computer science. Dr. Ellis grew up in Chicago and graduated from Parker High School while also working as a part-time night shift security guard for the Dover Corporation. While at Dover, he watched over the company's mainframe computers and became fascinated by them, so he read over the manuals during his shift and learned how to operate and repair the vacuum-tube-based machines. He earned degrees in mathematics and physics from Beloit College in Wisconsin, and while at Beloit, he was one of 10 North American college students to attend a computer science program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Based on his experiences there, he earned his PhD in computer science from Urbana-Champaign in 1969, making him the first Black person to ever do so. Dr. Ellis worked at Bell Labs, IBM, and Xerox, and from 1976–1984, he worked at the Palo Alto Research Center, where he led the team that created Officetalk, the first program to use icons and the Internet to allow for long-distance collaboration. This means that every icon-based app or operating system you've ever used was directly influenced by Skip Ellis. You could say he's "iconic"! (Sorry.)
Here's the plan for this short week as we wrap up Unit 8 and start Unit 9: Types, Strings, and While Loops:
finish Unit 8 Creative Task
Unit 8 Review
Unit 8 Practice Quiz
Unit 8 Quiz
9.1 Types and Input
Strings are pretty easy, but as always, please let me know if you have any questions. Have a great week – stay warm!
Hello again! I hope you've enjoyed your surprise 4-day weekend and stayed warm during the ice storms. This week I'd like to tell you about Dr. Timnit Gebru, a Black computer scientist who studies artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. Dr. Gebru was born in Ethiopia and fled the Eritrean–Ethiopian War when she was 15, eventually receiving political asylum in the United States. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees as well as her PhD from Stanford University. While at Stanford, she worked as an intern at Apple making audio circuitry and later developed signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. After brief stint at Microsoft where she investigated racial bias in facial recognition software, she joined Google in 2018 to co-lead a team the ethics of artificial intelligence. However, in late 2020, her employment at Google was terminated when she refused to withdraw a research paper about the serious risks of large language model AI systems (Dr. Gebru claims that she was fired, while Google has refused to say whether she resigned or was terminated). Since leaving Google, Dr. Gebru has co-founded Black in AI, a community of Black researchers working in AI, and the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a "space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech's pervasive influence". She has earned numerous accolades, including being named one of the world's 50 greatest leaders by Fortune Magazine in 2021 and one of Time Magazine's most influential people of 2022.
Here's the plan for this week as we continue Unit 8: Math Functions, Random Values, and Nested Loops:
finish 8.3 Nested For Loops
8.4 Unit 8 Exercises
start Unit 8 Creative Task
Next week, we'll take our Unit 8 Quiz, so make sure you don't forget everything during your time off. Have a great week, and enjoy your 4-day weekend!
Welcome to February, and Happy Black History Month! Before I list this week's activities, I'd like to tell you about Dorothy J. Vaughan (1910–2008), the first African-American female supervisor of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) who became an expert in digital computers and their applications in NASA programs. Ms. Vaughan graduated from Wilberforce University in Ohio with a degree in mathematics and started out as a math teacher. In 1943, to support our country's efforts in World War II, she joined NACA as a human "computer" who did complex calculations for engineers and scientists. She worked with computers Vera Huckel and Sara Bullock to create an algebraic methods handbook for mechanical calculating machines, and when NACA became NASA, she joined its new Analysis and Computation Division and became an expert FORTRAN programmer. Ms. Vaughan and her countless calculations supported NACA and NASA accomplishments and helped to achieve our country’s aerospace goals. Very impressive!
Here's the plan for this week as we continue Unit 8: Math Functions, Random Values, and Nested Loops:
finish 8.2 Random Values
8.3 Nested For Loops
8.4 Unit 8 Exercises
This will be our last full week of school for a while, because for the next three weeks we'll only have four school days each week due to teacher in-service, a holiday and the ACT. I hope you have a great week, and as always, let me know if you have any questions!
Hello again, and welcome to the last week of January! Here's the plan as we finish Unit 7 and start Unit 8: Math Functions, Random Values, and Nested Loops:
Unit 7 Review
Unit 7 Practice Quiz
Unit 7 Quiz
8.1 Math Functions - Notes and Exercises
8.2 Random Values - Notes and Exercises
As always, I hope you have a great week! Please let me know if you have any questions.
Wow, a five-day weekend! I hope you're all resting and staying warm. For this short week, we'll start to wrap up Unit 7:
finish Unit 7 Creative Task
Make sure you get enough sleep tonight so that you're ready to go back tomorrow, and enjoy your short week of school!
Hello again, I hope you had a good first week back! Here's the plan for this week as we continue our work in Unit 7:
finish 7.3 For Loops
7.4 Unit 7 Exercises
start Unit 7 Creative Task
Being able to loop through shapes in a group is going to open up a lot of fun new possibilities for us, especially in terms of game design. Have a great week, and as always, let me know if you have any questions!
Happy New Year 🥳, and welcome back from Winter Break! I hope you were able to take some time to rest, relax and recharge before we get right back to coding. Here's the plan for our first school week of 2025 as we start Unit 7: New Shapes, Local Variables, and For Loops:
review 1st Semester Exam
7.1 New Shapes
7.2 Local Variables
7.3 For Loops
Arcs are a little challenging, but everything else this week should be pretty straightforward. I hope you have a great first week back! As always, please let me know if you have any questions.
Welcome to exam week! The plan is pretty straightforward – study for the 1st Semester Exam so you can earn the best grade possible and enjoy your Winter Break. Here's the schedule for this week:
Mon. 12/16
review the Success Criteria for 1st Semester
redo the Practice Quizzes in Units 1-6
Tue. 12/17
redo the Practice Quizzes in Units 1-6
Wed. 12/18
1st period exam – 7:30-9:00am
2nd period exam – 9:15-10:45am
Lunch – 10:50-11:20am
6/7th or 7/8th period exam – 11:25am-12:55pm
Open study – 1:10-2:29pm
Thu. 12/19
9th period exam – 7:30-9:00am
10th period exam – 9:15-10:45am
Lunch – 10:50-11:20am
Make-up exams – 11:25am-12:55pm
Open study – 1:10-2:29pm
Fri. 12/20
3rd period exam – 7:30-9:00am
4/5th or 5/6th period exam – 9:15-10:45am
Lunch – 10:50-11:20am
Make-up exams – 11:25am-12:55pm
Open study – 1:10-2:29pm
DUE: ANY OUTSTANDING WORK FROM 2nd QUARTER MUST BE COMPLETED BY TODAY AT NOON!
I'll also send out the exam schedule flyer on Remind and on Google Classroom as a picture so you can save it to your phone. Good luck on this exam and all of your other exams this week! Please let me know if you have any questions at all. I hope you have a wonderful and relaxing Winter Break, and I'll see you next year!
We've finally made it to the end of 1st Semester! The plan this week is to wrap up Unit 6: Groups, Step Events and Motion so that you can spend next week preparing for your 1st Semester Exam on Thursday, December 19th at 9:15am. Here's what we're doing for our last full week of class in 2024:
finish 6.4 Unit 6 Exercises
Unit 6 Creative Task
Unit 6 Review
Unit 6 Practice Quiz
Unit 6 Quiz
Some of you are very far behind in the course because you haven't been working during class time, or because you're not making up your work from being absent. The deadline to complete assignments on CS Academy for 2nd Quarter will be Friday, December 20th at noon.
Parents: please check ProgressBook so you know what your student needs to work on before the end of the quarter!
Have a wonderful week! As always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Welcome back! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving Break and were able to get some rest so you're fully recharged and ready to go for these final three weeks before the end of the semester. Here's the plan for the first week of December ☃️:
6.3 Step Events and Motion - Notes and Exercises
start 6.4 Unit 6 Exercises
There are only 12 school days left to get through Unit 6 and its Creative Task, and I want to take at least one day two weeks from now to go over everything that will be on your 1st Semester Exam, which will look a lot like your quizzes. Imagine taking all of your quizzes so far, merging them together, and removing the free response questions, and that'll be your exam.
I hope you have a great week back, and please let me know if you have any questions!
We've finally made it to Thanksgiving Break! 🦃 I'm really proud of you all for sticking with Intro to Computer Science for this long. For this last week before break, we're going to start our last unit in the semester – Unit 6: Groups, Step Events, and Motion. Step events are awesome, you're going to love them! Here's the plan:
start Unit 6: Groups, Step Events, and Motion
6.1 Groups - Notes and Exercises
6.2 Group Methods - Notes and Exercises
start 6.3 Step Events and Motion - Notes and Exercises
This will be a nice place to pause until we return from break and tackle the rest of Unit 6. If you're behind in the course, you should use some of your free time over break to get caught up as much as you can. You can message me on Remind if you have any questions or need any help with your code. I hope you have a relaxing Thanksgiving Break, and I'll see you in December!
Greetings, future coders! For this week in Intro to CS, we're going to wrap up Unit 5: Complex Conditionals and More Key Events with a Creative Task and a quiz. We're also going on a field trip to explore IT careers! Here's the plan:
finish 5.3 Unit 5 Exercises
Unit 5 Creative Task
Passport to IT Careers Field trip on Wednesday, November 13th - meet in the auditorium atrium after 1st period!
Unit 5 Review
Unit 5 Practice Quiz
Unit 5 Quiz
The field trip should expose you to the wide variety of good paying IT careers that are out there, so I hope you get a lot out of it. If nothing else, we'll get out of the building, enjoy a free lunch, and maybe pick up some swag from the companies that are there. 🤑 Let me know if you have any questions, and have a great week!
Hello again, I hope you enjoyed your extra hour of sleep this morning! For this week in Intro to CS, we're going to start Unit 5: Complex Conditionals and More Key Events. Here's what we're doing for the first week of November:
5.1 Complex Conditionals - Notes and Exercises
5.2 More Key Events - Notes and Exercises
start 5.3 Unit 5 Exercises
Complex conditionals let us combine if statements so that we can test multiple conditions at the same time. For example, did the user click on a specific shape while it's on the top half of the canvas? Complex conditionals give us a lot more control over how our programs behave, and they're used throughout computer science, including in AI. I hope you enjoy the early morning sunshine while it lasts, and as always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Good afternoon, I hope you've enjoyed this excellent weekend! Here's what we're doing in Intro to Computer Science for the last week of October 🎃:
4.4 Unit 4 Exercises
Unit 4 Creative Task
Unit 4 Review
Unit 4 Practice Quiz
Unit 4 Quiz
Do your best to not overdose on candy, and please let me know if you have any questions. I hope you have a wonderful week!
Hello, future computer scientists! I hope you're enjoying this extended weekend and getting outside to enjoying the warm weather while it lasts. For this week in Intro to CS, we're going to start wrapping up Unit 4: More Conditionals, Key Events, and Methods with coding activities about methods, which are simply functions that interact with an object. Here's what we're doing for this short first week of 2nd Quarter:
BEGIN 2nd QUARTER
finish 4.2 Key Events - Notes and Exercises
4.3 Methods - Notes and Exercises
4.4 Unit 4 Exercises
Methods are super important to computer science! Once you learn how to use them, you're going to have a lot more tools available to build programs and games the way you want. Please let me know if you have any questions, and have a great week!
Welcome to the end of 1st Quarter! It may be hard to believe, but after this week, we'll be 25% done with the school year. For this week in Intro to CS, we're going to wrap up this unit so that we can move on to Unit 4, which will allow us to detect keystrokes. Here's what we're doing this week:
finish Unit 3 Creative Task
Unit 3 Review
Unit 3 Practice Quiz
Unit 3 Quiz
start Unit 4: More Conditionals, Key Events, and Methods
4.1 More Conditionals (if-elif-else Statements) - Notes and Exercises
start 4.2 Key Events - Notes and Exercises
FYI Friday is an Early Release Day and it's also the end of 1st Quarter. Make sure you're caught up with all of your work through Unit 3.
Congratulations on making it this far! When we come back next week, we'll keep working on key events and learn about methods, which are very, very powerful. Please let me know if you have any questions, and have a great week!
And just like that, it's October! 🍁 For this week in Intro CS, we're going to begin to wrap up Unit 3. Here's what we're doing for the next-to-last week of 1st Quarter:
3.4 Unit 3 Exercises
Unit 3 Creative Task
FYI Parent-teacher conferences are from 5-8pm on Monday, October 7th; you can use this link to sign up! Also, there will be no school for students on Friday due to a teacher PD day. If you're behind, you should use the long three-day weekend to get caught up before 1st Quarter ends next Friday.
I hope you enjoy this short week! Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi there! I hope you had fun at Homecoming and were able to dry out after all the rain we got this weekend. For this week in Intro CS, we're going to continue our work on Unit 3: Mouse Motion Events, Conditionals, and Helper Functions. Here's the plan:
3.2 Conditionals (if Statements) - Notes and Exercises
3.3 Helper Functions - Notes and Exercises
If statements and helper functions are concepts that you'll use throughout the rest of this course and in any future programming languages you might learn, including Java. I hope you have an excellent week, and as always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Hello, future coders! For this week in Intro CS, we'll wrap our work on Unit 2 and move into Unit 3, which adds more fun mouse events that we can use. Here's the plan for the first week of fall 🍁:
finish Unit 2 Creative Task
Unit 2 Review
Unit 2 Practice Quiz
Unit 2 Quiz
start Unit 3: Mouse Motion Events, Conditionals, and Helper Functions
3.1 Mouse Motion Events - Notes and Exercises
Let me know if you have any questions, and have a great Homecoming week!
Hi, everybody! This week we'll continue our work on functions, mouse events and parameters as we begin to wrap up this short unit. Here's the plan for the last week of summer:
finish 2.2 Mouse Events - Notes and Exercises
2.3 Properties - Notes and Exercises
2.4 Unit 2 Exercises
start Unit 2 Creative Task
If you feel like you're struggling to keep up, please ask me for help! My prep period is 4/5th period, my PLC is 6/7th and my lunch is 8th, so you can come up any day during lunch and work in my room to get caught up. You can also skip some of the exercises from Unit 1 for now, but I recommend eventually going back and doing as many of them as possible. If you have Tuesday afternoons open, that's when RHS Coders Club meets in my room, and a lot of our members have already taken Intro CS and would be happy to help you.
I hope you have a wonderful week! As always, please let me know if you have any questions, and I'll see you in Fall. 🍂
Hello again! I hope you had a good weekend and have recovered from all that rain on Friday night! Here's what we're doing in class this week as we wrap up our first unit in the course and move on to Unit 2:
finish Unit 1 Creative Task
Unit 1 Review
Unit 1 Practice Quiz
Unit 1 Quiz
start Unit 2: Functions, Mouse Events, and Properties
2.1 Functions - Notes and Exercises
start 2.2 Mouse Events - Notes and Exercises
Unit 2 is a lot of fun because we'll start to make our drawings interactive by coding them so that they change when we click on certain objects.
This week, I'm going to pass out PSAT practice exams to all sophomores and juniors in the class. The PSAT takes place on Wednesday, October 9th in the morning at RHS and costs $19. It's a good way to practice for the full-length SAT, but more importantly, it's the qualifying exam for the prestigious National Merit Scholarship for juniors. Doing well on the PSAT could really pay off, and it looks good on a college application. Registration begins on September 20th on MyPaymentsPlus - I highly recommend taking it!
Have a great week, and let me know if you have any questions!
Hello everyone, I hope you're enjoying your three-day weekend! Here's what we're doing in class for this abbreviated week as we continue working on our first unit in the course:
finish 1.3 Shapes - Notes and Exercises
1.4 Unit 1 Exercises
start Unit 1 Creative Task
As always, please let me know if you have any questions!
Welcome to the first full week of school! I hope that school has started well for you and you have any issues with your schedule worked out. Now that we've had a few days to get to know each other and get everyone logged in to CMU CS Academy, we can get to work! Here's what we're doing in class this week:
1.2 Colors - Notes and Exercises
1.3 Shapes - Notes and Exercises
We'll be using these colors and shapes throughout the entire course, so make sure you complete as many exercises as you can. Fortunately, they're all pretty easy. Let me know you have any questions, and have a great week!
Welcome to the 2024-2025 school year! I'm excited to have you in class, and I hope you're looking forward to a good year of learning about computer science.
Computer Science (CS) is the theoretical, scientific, and mathematical approach to information and its computation. Intro to Computer Science ("Intro CS") focuses on computing skills related to programming in Python, an industry standard, high-level language. In this class, we will use Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Academy, a teacher-led, online, interactive high school computer science curriculum that teaches coding through developing games. Students work at their own pace and get help from me when they get stuck. I believe that every student can learn computer science!
Here's what we're doing in class for the first week of school:
Welcome to Computer Science! - first day presentation
get logged in to CMU CS Academy
1.1 Basics - Notes and Exercises
I hope you had a great first week and that you were able to get some rest this weekend before we attempt to go to school for five full days without strange bell schedules or burning birds. Let me know you have any questions!