May 31st - June 4th, 2021

Monday:
Memorial Day holiday, no school

Tuesday:

Introduce images and sounds, functions that return values.  Here are the slides.

Practice functions that return values with CodingBat

Wednesday:

Review for Unit 7 quiz.  Here's the review sheet.

Last class time to work on Unit 7 problems

Thursday:
Unit 7 quiz (45 minutes max)
Introduce final project. 

This video might give you some ideas.

Here is the spreadsheet to edit to indicate who (if anyone) you plan to work with, to provide a link to the journal you'll be keeping, and to indicate what you plan to make.

Friday:
Everyone working on final project design

(I will grade the Unit 7 problems at 5 PM today.)

Here is a review sheet for the final exam, which will be on Thursday, June 17th.

May 24th - 28th, 2021

Monday:

All-virtual day.  Everyone working on CMU Unit 7.

Please note that to be consistent with the first semester, I won't be giving any extra credit points for problems in this unit.

 The Unit 7 quiz will be on June 3rd.

Congratulations to Demetra for taking second place in the CMU CS Academy May Creative Task Challenge, in the CS Principles division!  Here is her winning entry.  Here is the first place entry, if you're curious about the competition.

Tuesday:

End hybrid instruction!  Cohorts A and B together at last. . .

Here are the Unit 7 slides.  We'll probably review some of them every day. 

Congratulations to Demetra for taking second place in the CMU CS Academy May Creative Task Challenge, in the CS Principles division!

Wednesday:

Everyone working on Unit 7. To stay on track, you should have finished 7.1 and 7.2 by this morning.

Thursday:

Your Machine Learning paper is due at 7:30 AM today, both on Google Classroom and turnitin.  Remember that the late penalty is 1% per day after this morning, until Tuesday morning at 7:30 AM, when it jump up to the district standard of 8% per day.  So a paper submitted at 7:29 AM Tuesday will be penalized 5%, and a paper submitted two minutes later will be penalized 13%. Don't tempt fate, get it done early!

Everyone working on Unit 7. To stay on track, you should have finished 7.3 by the end of today's class.

Friday:
Memorial Day, no school.  Take some time to thank a vet.

Week of May 17th - 21st, 2021

Monday:
Personal day for Mr. J.
Students who have completed problems in 5.4 and 5.5 can work on Machine Learning paper, due May 27th at 7:30 AM.

Here is a list of stuff you should know for the quiz tomorrow.

Here is the reference sheet for Unit 5. Paper copies were given to Cohorts A and B.  You can refer to it while taking the quiz.

Here are the slides from class.

Tuesday:
Unit 5.4 and 5.5 due at 7:30 AM
Quiz on Unit 5

Cohort A students can take a look at a computer motherboard after the quiz.

Wednesday:

Remember that the Machine Learning paper is due on Thursday, May 27th, at 7:30 AM.  Also remember that it was assigned about a month ago. . . don't wait, chip away at it now, and make yours one that you will be proud of.  This might provide some inspiration. (13:56)

Cohort B students can take a look at a computer motherboard while watching the videos,

Overview of computer history:

Early Computing: Crash Course Computer Science #1 (11:52) Overview of computing up until the early 1900s

How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology (1:56)

The greatest machine that never was (12:14) Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing
Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine #2 (5:47) shows the Difference Engine #2 in action

Thursday:

More computer history:
Electronic Computing: Crash Course Computer Science #2 (10:43) From about 1900 to the beginning of the transistor era

The Queen of Code (16:30) Grace Hopper was a serious badass.
ENIAC (0:38)
SAGE (just watch up to 6:55, the stuff after that is fairly irrelevant)

Friday:

How Computers Work:

Now we've learned a little about the early days of computing, from the abacus and Charles Babbage's analytical engine to the WW2 era Mark-I and ENIAC, and the gigantic SAGE computers built using vacuum tubes.  How do you get from that to a smartphone in your pocket?  The answer is the transistor, and the integrated circuit that combines millions or billions of transistors into a smallish chip.  Here is a circuit board that has several chips on it -- those black square things:

Grind the top off one of those chips and it looks like this:

Take a closer look at the little square in the middle with the tiny wires:

Zoom in:

Zoom in more with an electron microscope (not the same chip as above):

So, how do you make something like this?  It's built up in many layers using a very complex technique called photolithograpy.  This gives a pretty good picture:
Integrated Circuits and Moore's Law: Crash Course in Computer Science (12:40 + promo at the end)
How do they make silicon wafers and computer chips? (8:53)
50 Years of Moore's Law (2:03)
Zoom into a microchip (3:40)

Zoom in on the chip in your cell phone  (0:32)

So, how does all this actually work?  Let me try to explain . . .
Here is a copy of the slides I'll be going through (updated).
Demo the Visible Computer.

Begin CMU Unit 7 in remaining time.

Week of May 10th - 14th, 2021

Note: I will be out next Monday May 17th.  Problems from Unit 5.4 and 5.5 will not be graded until Tuesday morning at 7:30 AM.  The Unit 5 quiz will be on Tuesday, rather than Monday.

Monday:

Review 5.3 concepts: iterating through lists, indexing into lists,  using % and len(), using range() with one parameter

Continue to work on CMU Unit 5.3.

Tuesday:

Review 5.3 concepts: list methods append(), insert(), remove(),  pop()

Continue to work on CMU Unit 5.3

Wednesday:

5.3 problems due at 7:30 AM today.

Begin working on Unit 5.4

Note -- I think the 'juicer' problem in 5.5 is way too tricky for one lousy point.  Here's a hint:

 if powerButton.hits(mouseX, mouseY):

   for nxt in app.fruitsToBlend:

     Rect(175, 210, 65, 90, fill=nxt.color, opacity=100/(1+len(app.fruitsToBlend)))

     nxt.visible = False

Thursday:

Review concepts from Unit 5.4: types and type errors,  input() and app.getTextInput(), int() and str(), strings, concatenation, looping, and indexing strings

Friday:

Review for quiz Tuesday.  Here are the slides I presented in class. Here is a list of stuff you should know.  Here is the reference sheet for Unit 5. Paper copies were given to Cohorts A and B.  You can refer to it while taking the quiz.

Remainder of Unit (5.4 and 5.5 problems) due at 7:30 AM Tuesday.

CMU Kahoots from their CS1 course - some different material

CS1, Unit 4

CS1, Unit 6 (includes some stuff we haven't discussed yet)

CS1, Unit 7 (again, includes some stuff we haven't discussed)