Computer Science

This course is a one-semester Computer Science course giving you the opportunity to explore and work with the underlying languages and representations that make web pages on the internet work.  A lot of our time will be spent in exercises and projects where we creatively design pages and sites for the web. 

We will start the semester by looking at two important web languages:  HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).  These languages allow us to represent and organize information including text, images, and multimedia, in a way that is understood by modern web browsers.  

Then, we will explore ways of designing an entire web site, utilizing a css framework (bootstrap) that allows us to integrate unity and variety in our sites, while saving us from constantly “reinventing the wheel”.

Throughout, we will utilize engineering design processes for designing client-focused solutions (in our case a web page or web site).

Once we have a good foundation, we will briefly explore Java Script as a way to add interactive elements to our Web documents, and investigate how we would use server technologies to make our site live on the web, and expand our design possibilities. 

We will spend a lot of time this semester CREATING.  We will work together to create documents and applications for the web.

We will spend a lot of time writing code in the Java programming language.  We will dive into particular approaches to writing code in order to solve problems and accomplish particular goals.  We will utilize Java as the programming (coding) language, which is the required language for both the AP and IB tests. 

The purpose of our work is largely to engage with and become better at designing algorithms and creating solutions to solve problems.  We want to understand the logic of different coding structures and approaches, as well as to be able to implement our algorithms in the Java Program language.  We will also talk about Testing and Documenting our code.

Java is an Object-Oriented Programming language which means that we will have the opportunity to engage with a way of thinking about solving problems that starts by thinking about the "things" or "objects" that are involved and how they interact, instead of jumping right away into what we want our program to do.

We will also engage with a variety of common (applicable across many different languages) approaches to solving problems (breaking the problem down into smaller modules, iterative approaches, recursive approaches, using arrays and lists, and more.)

Students will be prepared to take the AP Computer Science A exam (or the IB SL exam)

This is a fun and challenging course.  I think you are going to enjoy it!

In this class, we will build on our existing Object-Oriented programming skills (in Java), in particular working with data structures (such as linked lists, stacks, queues, and binary trees.)  We will also focus on computer networking, computing system resources, control systems, and other topics.

Students will be prepared to take the IB HL exam (or may take the IB SL exam if it fits their needs better.)