Welcome to AP Computer Science Principles

Great job with the Internet Simulator and the creation of your first Communication Protocol!

This week we are going to be working on the following:

AP Computer Science Class – Unit 1 - Continued

To Think; To Develop Problem-Solving Skills; To Discover; and To Create;

Learning to Compute and Computing to Learn

Classroom Protocol:

This is where you will come every day to find out what we are going to do in class for that day. Every day you are to come to your Quia class web page upon arriving to class, go to your class web page, and follow the directions for today.

Homework Policy:

All assignments will be due on the deadline date given. It is the responsibility for all students to complete their assignments on time. Any assignments received late will not be accepted and a grade will not be given for that assignment.

Accessing your Class Weekly Agenda:

Each week’s agenda and assignments will be updated and posted on your Quia class web page on a weekly basis.  Previous weeks Assignments/Agendas will be provided with a link at the end of the current week’s Class Web Page in case you need to revisit due to an absence, or you’re required to make up, or catch up on your course assignments.

Homework Assignment: Daily homework assignments may be found at the end of each day’s agenda.

F Day – Lunch 11:35 – 11:59

This Week’s Agenda:

UNIT 1: The Internet: This unit begins exploring the technical challenges and questions that arise from the need to represent digital information in computers and transfer it between people and computational devices. In the second half of the unit, students solve problems similar ones that had to be solved to build the real Internet. Students design their own versions of protocols, each one layered on the previous one, in a process that mimics the layered sets of protocols on the real Internet. Topics include: the digital representation of numbers and text, Internet Protocol, DNS, and TCP/IP.

Chapter 1: Representing and Transmitting Information

Objectives

Students will be able to:

• Communicate with classmates about computing innovations in their lives.
• Describe positive and negative effects of computing innovations.

Big Questions

·         Why do computers use binary to represent digital information?

·         How does data physically get from one computer to another?

·         Are the ways data is represented and transmitted with computers laws of nature or a laws of man?

Enduring Understandings

·         2.1 A variety of abstractions built upon binary sequences can be used to represent all digital data.

·         3.3 There are trade offs when representing information as digital data.

·         6.2 Characteristics of the Internet influence the systems built on it.

·         7.2 Computing enables innovation in nearly every field.

Vocabulary

• Innovation - A novel or improved idea, device, product, etc, or the development thereof.
• Binary - A way of representing information using only two options.
• Bit - A contraction of "Binary Digit". A bit is the single unit of information in a computer, typically represented as a 0 or 1.
• Bandwidth - Transmission capacity measure by bit rate
• Bit - A contraction of "Binary Digit". A bit is the single unit of information in a computer, typically represented as a 0 or 1.
• Bit rate - (sometimes written bitrate) the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. e.g. 8 bits/sec.
• Latency - Time it takes for a bit to travel from its sender to its receiver.
• Protocol - A set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between devices.
• ASCII - ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is the universally recognized raw text format that any computer can understand.
• code - (v) to write code, or to write instructions for a computer.

Monday 9-26-16 – Day G – No Class

Tuesday 9-27-2016 – Day H

Lesson 3: Sending Binary Messages with the Internet Simulator

Standards Alignment

CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards

CL – Collaboration

CT - Computational Thinking

Computer Science Principles

2.1 - A variety of abstractions built upon binary sequences can be used to represent all digital data.

2.3 - Models and simulations use abstraction to generate new understanding and knowledge.

3.1 - People use computer programs to process information to gain insight and knowledge.

3.3 - There are trade offs when representing information as digital data.

6.1 - The Internet is a network of autonomous systems.

6.2 - Characteristics of the Internet influence the systems built on it.

Objectives

Students will be able to:

• Explain how synchronization and coordination enable the transmission of binary messages.
• Develop a protocol for exchanging binary messages in two directions.
• Calculate the bit rate for a binary message exchange.
• Provide a definition of "bit" and relate it to the binary messages they have seen so far.

Activator: Open up your Engineering Journal and review what you entered last class. Review the Standards, Objectives, above, for today’s lesson. Click on https://studio.code.org/ and log in. Locate the Unit 1: The Internet tile and click ‘View course’.

Direct Instruction:

• Student demonstration of their 3-State exchange communication protocol
• Verify creation of paper.li accounts and creation of daily newspaper to be used for practice with the Exploring Performance Tasks.

Students will create a digital artifact tool to be used for collecting and researching new computing artifacts. This tool is to be used on a weekly basis for practice with the CollegeBoard’s Exploration of Computing Innovations Performance Task.

Paper.li Directions: 

1)   Mr. PC’s example of his paper.li account and newspaper.

2)   Create an account at paper.li

3)   Create a newspaper

4)   Research and add computing and technology links, urls, to your newspaper as feeds of information.

5)   Go to Google Sites, create a site, and add the url to your paper.li so it will be displayed

6)   Have the paper.li contents updated using settings. You can have a daily newspaper sent to your school email address.

• Review progress made in code.org Stage 5 Binary Numbers

Guided Practice:

Discussion

Lead a discussion that explores the assumptions made when decoding these messages, and more importantly, explores what information they would need in order to decode it.

• Did this new message make you think about your answer to the first question? Do you want to change your answer to the first question?
• What assumptions did you make in interpreting these messages?
• Is this protocol specific enough to allow useful communication of a binary message? If not what information would need to be added to it?

Quick Vocabulary

We need to get some terminology down so that we can speak about our problems and solutions more efficiently.

·         Protocol - For our purposes today a “protocol” is simply a set of rules about sending, receiving and interpreting binary messages.

·         Bit We will call each element of a binary message a bit. “Bit” is short for binary digit. So for example if you have a binary message A B B A, we would say that is a 4-bit message.

The 2-bit Message Exchange Challenge!

Students will practice relaying a 2-bit sequence with their partners. The goalis to exchange 2-bit messages (partner sends a 2-bit message, other partner sends a 2-bit message back) as quickly and accurately as possible. In other words, students are trying to get the fastest bit rate possible.

• Each initial sender should be able to confirm that the message was received correctly and resent because the message that they have received is the same as the original.
• As students iterate and perfect their protocol, they should try to extend their protocol to send more bits or send them more quickly, while maintaining accuracy. When each group has a working protocol and has time to practice (~10 minutes), have an all-class showdown to see who can do it the fastest.

Rules for the Challenge:

• Student pairs can decide who sends first.
• Teacher reveals sequence of bits to be sent. Partner A of each group may enter this sequence of bits into Internet Simulator but may not begin sending them.
• Teacher will say “GO” and partners will exchange messages.
• During the challenge students may not communicate with one another. (Note: feel free to put partners on opposite sides of a room or in separate rooms altogether.)
• Students yell “STOP” once they have completed their exchange.
• Teacher will verify that each partner received what the other sent by checking outgoing and incoming messages.

1)   Watch the The Internet: Wires, Cables & WiFi - Video

Discussion:

Relate what’s shown in the video to what students had to do in the previous two lessons:

• first making a bit-sending device
• second solving the coordination problem of sending bits using a wire that can only have 1 of 2 possible states.
• These are both problems that real engineers had to solve as well when building the internet for the first time.

If students have not already done so, they should calculate the fastest bit rate they were able to achieve. Lead a quick classroom discussion about the following topics, using these prompts:

• How has today’s activity added to or altered your definition of a bit?
• A major focus of today’s activity was timing and coordination. What things did you need to coordinate or agree about ahead of time in order for your protocol to work?

• What is the best bit rate you were able to achieve? What would it take to go faster?
• How fast do you think computers transmit bits?

Answer the questions in code.org for Stage 3 of this unit of study

Assessment for/of learning: Completion of today’s class assignment.

Summarizer: Mr. PC will review each day what each student accomplished and the focus of tomorrow.

Ticket to Leave:

In order to prepare you for your two AP CSP college-board performance tasks we need to get use to reflecting on our daily work and experiences. This is a skill that will prove to be useful when you go on to college, enter the workforce, and even in every aspect of your everyday life.  Every day at the end of class you should save your work, open up your journal, put down today’s date, and provide the following information.

1.   Provide at least on new thing that you learned today – Refer to today’s Objectives

2.   What did you accomplish today?

3.   Indicate any problems or obstacles you experienced

4.   How did you solve the problems or obstacles that you experienced?

Feel free to provide screen shots of your daily work in order to illustrate your day’s activities. Windows provides a Snipping Tool within its provided Accessories that may be used for this purpose.

Homework:

Complete your ticket to leave journal entry. Make sure your paper.li newspaper has been setup and you receive a newspaper at your school email daily.

Wednesday 9-28-2016 – Day A  AND Thursday 9-29-2016 – Day B – Lesson 6 – Sending Numbers

Standards Alignment

CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards

CT - Computational Thinking

Computer Science Principles

2.1 - A variety of abstractions built upon binary sequences can be used to represent all digital data.

2.3 - Models and simulations use abstraction to generate new understanding and knowledge.

3.1 - People use computer programs to process information to gain insight and knowledge.

6.2 - Characteristics of the Internet influence the systems built on it.

Objectives:

Students will be able to:

·         Calculate the range of values that can be represented using binary numbers of a given size in bits.

·         Invent a simple communication protocol for sending a list of numbers that represent coordinates on a cartesian grid.

·         Use the Internet Simulator to send the list of points that make up the drawing to a friend.

Activator: Open up your Engineering Journal and review what you entered last class. Review the Standards, Objectives, above, for today’s lesson. Click on https://studio.code.org/ and log in. Locate the Unit 1: The Internet tile and click ‘View course’.

Direct Instruction:

1)   Review Revised Course and Exam Description including Performance Tasks Samples

Reviewed Course and Exam Description

Guided Practice:

1)   View the following Internet Simulator Video:

Internet Simulator – Part 2

2)   Log into code.org and go to Stage 6 – Sending Numbers

3)   Click on the ‘File’ icon and read the introduction. You will also need to open the corresponding activity guides found at the bottom of the introduction.

4)   Choose different partners than you worked with in Stage 3 and decide how you will complete this task.

Assessment for/of learning: Completion of today’s class assignment.

Summarizer: Mr. PC will review each day what each student accomplished and the focus of tomorrow.

Ticket to Leave:

In order to prepare you for your two AP CSP college-board performance tasks we need to get use to reflecting on our daily work and experiences. This is a skill that will prove to be useful when you go on to college, enter the workforce, and even in every aspect of your everyday life.  Every day at the end of class you should save your work, open up your journal, put down today’s date, and provide the following information.

1.   Provide at least on new thing that you learned today – Refer to today’s Objectives

2.   What did you accomplish today?

3.   Indicate any problems or obstacles you experienced

4.   How did you solve the problems or obstacles that you experienced?

Feel free to provide screen shots of your daily work in order to illustrate your day’s activities. Windows provides a Snipping Tool within its provided Accessories that may be used for this purpose.

Homework:

1)   Complete your ticket to leave journal entry. Complete answering the questions found in code.org for Stage 6.

2)   Choose an article from your paper.li and choose a Computing Innovation which you will Explore according to the requirements of the Explore Performance Task. Be prepared to present to the rest of the class next week. Students will get a chance to use the Performance Task Rubric and Performance Tasks Samples to discuss and collaborate on ways in which we can improve on our task performance.

Friday 9-30-2016 – Day C – No Class

Thanks for a great week!

Mr. PC 

AP CSP Week 2 Agenda