Piloting AP® Computer Science Principles
Panel Presentation at TCEA
9:15 AM, February 2, 2016
Bill Dunklau
Moderator
Lakehill Preparatory School, Dallas, TX
bdunklau@lakehillprep.org
Barrett Bryant
Chairman, Department of Computer Science
University of North Texas
barrett.bryant@unt.edu
Owen Astrachan
Principal Investigator, CS Principles Project
Duke University
ola@cs.duke.edu
Jeff Gray
Department of Computer Science
University of Alabama
gray@cs.ua.edu
It is one thing to design a college course that can serve as the first semester of the major
sequence in computer science: there are, after all, numerous textbooks and other materials to choose
from. It is quite another to develop requirements for a computer elective course that can support a
wide variety of majors, such as science, engineering, mobile app development, music, visual design,
animation, and art, work with a number of institutions to develop courses around these requirements,
and obtain the commitment of over 100 major colleges and universities to reward high school students
for passing these courses. Such a course has been designed, developed, and is in the final year of pilot
testing. "Go live" for the AP® Computer Science Principles (CSP) course is this fall, 2016!
The College Board has had an Advance Placement® course that has been serving as a
preliminary course in the computer science major sequence for many years. The project currently ready
for launch will provide the curriculum framework for this new course that the digital generations – those
who are already "using" – could benefit from as builders and makers.
The impetus for the CSP course may be traced, in part, to a proposal made by Jeannette M.
Wing: “Professors of computer science should teach a course called ‘Ways to Think Like a Computer
Scientist’ to college freshmen, making it available to non-majors, not just to computer science majors.”
She also called for “pre-college students to [be exposed to] computational methods and models.”
The new course framework is doing just that: it has sparked a number of first-semester
introductory college courses, some of which, in turn, have been offered as testing-phase AP high school
courses. This framework was broadly conceived as incorporating six computational thinking practices
and seven big ideas, seeking to nurture an environment in which the technology-assisted problemsolvers of tomorrow can follow their interests, grappling with social, economic, and cultural issues. The
computational thinking practices are: connecting computing, creating computational artifacts,
abstracting, analyzing problems and artifacts, communicating, and collaborating. The big ideas are:
creativity, abstraction, data, algorithms, programming, the Internet, and global impact. For every big
idea there are enduring understandings, each supported by one or more learning objectives, which will
be tested on the AP-CSP Exam. In addition, two performance tasks with short names Explore and Create
assess student proficiency in the learning objectives through a "Web-based digital application" and
"digital artifacts."
The AP Computer Science Principles course is already being offered as a credit-bearing course in
many institutions of higher education, including The University of North Texas, and is expected to be
offered in “over 900” high schools in the fall with the customary expectation of college credit or
placement for passing scores.
Since the early days of electronic computing the programmable machines have been used to
tally, aggregate, analyze, search, sort, solve, simulate, and summarize. In short, they have served as
prodigious “data-crunching” resources in the various industries, agencies, and disciplines to which their
high speed circuits have been applied. As the problems became more complex, the field of computer
science emerged, and the ways that computer scientists solved problems, managed complexity,
visualized data sets, innovated, and created knowledge in these fields became more robust and
relevant. Now the Computer Science Principles (CSP) course can broaden participation even further by
connecting each student and their far-flung interests with the capabilities of this powerful resource.
References and Resources
ACM Inroads. Special Section on CS10K Community: Part 1: Exploring Computer Science. September
2015.
ACM Inroads. Special Section on CS10K Community: Part 2: Computer Science Principles. December
2015.
AP Computer Science Principles. http://apcsprinciples.org/
AP Computer Science Principles: Curriculum Framework – 2016-2017. CollegeBoard, New York. Print.
Astrachan, CS Principles: Development and evolution of a course and a community, SIGCSE 2013.
http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/sigcse2013/Program/viewAcceptedProposal.pdf?sessionType=specialSessi
on&sessionNumber=6 (Recently unable to access this URL)
College Board AP Annual Conference. http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/talks/csprinciples/apac2012.ppt
Computer Science Principles Draft Curriculum Framework.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/2013-0607-comp-sci-principles-cf-final.pdf
Computer Science Teachers Association. http://csta.acm.org/Curriculum/sub/CSPResources.html
Dunklau, Bill. Piloting AP Computer Science Principles. 2014.
New Course and Exam. http://www.collegeboard.com/html/computerscience/index.html
Performance Assessment Tasks for Piloting in 2013-14.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/CSP-PB-tasks.pdf
Texas Regional Collaboratives for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching. Computer Science
Principles Mini-Conference, February 24-25, 2016. www.thetrc.org/cs-principles-mini-conference/
Wing. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/papers/Wing06.pdf