This
year in AP computer science I enjoyed working on recursion and arraylists.
While recursion problems were not fun to trace in quizzes, they were really fun
to write. It was really cool to see how much of the problem you could solve
without any loops. Learning recursion through cargo bot was really fun, and an
interesting way to visualize how recursion worked. Learning how the stack
worked was probably the hardest concept of recursion to grasp and cargo bot was
a great way to visualize the stack. arraylists were not particularly fun but
after learning arrays they were a wonderful relief. I don’t know why arrays are
just eliminated and we only use arraylists because they are so convenient and
have so many methods. I did not like working with grid world or trying to make
pong. Both of these were incredibly complicated programs. Grid world was hard
just because I didn't understand how all the different methods and actors
worked. I also was never able to test the methods or classes that I wrote
because I didn't know where I was supposed to write them so that they would
take effect when I ran grid world. Making pong was just frustrating because
there were so many different classes and interfaces and I could not keep it all
straight. Maybe in the future there could be a comment at the top of each class
that says what it does instead of having to read through all the code and
trying to figure it out. Next year I would not change much. I really did feel
completely prepared for the AP test when I took it, despite the fact that i may
not have had enough practice. though i did have plenty of opportunity to
practice. I think that we should have been required to take at least one of the
practice tests in addition to the mock ap. I feel that this would have helped
me be more prepared for the time aspect of the test. Another thing that would
have help me a lot this year is if the worksheets were available to print
online. i understand that there are copywriter issues but maybe if they were
accessible on a password protected document? I do miss the TED talks and world
tech updates but they’re not critical to the class. Maybe I would make It so
that we cover arrays before we cover string modifications. And I would cover
strings for a longer period of time just because this year and in computer
programming that was the hardest thing for me to learn. I liked it when we we
were given several labs to choose from. i think that this would be a better way
to run the majority of the year. I also liked it better when we had multiple labs
on the same topic that we were required to do because I always felt confident
in that topic afterwards. Overall it was a pretty good year.
