The Beauty and Joy of
Computing Curriculum
and the AP CS: Principles
project
Brian Harvey, UC Berkeley
Dan Garcia, UC Berkeley
Jens Mönig, MioSoft
Agenda
• AP CS: Principles, CS10K, and the
Beauty and Joy of Computing
• Scratch, BYOB, and Snap!
• Four big computer science ideas:
– Procedures
– Recursion
– Procedure as data
– Object oriented programming
AP CS: Principles and CS10K
Jan Cuny talked about these in today’s keynote.
We were one of the initial five pilot sites for APCS:P;
another site, UNC Charlotte, used a modified
version of our curriculum.
CS: Principles is a big tent—many approaches are
possible.
The BJC vision: Kids don’t need us to tell them that
computers can achieve cool effects; we want them
to see that computer programs themselves can be
beautiful, and this means (at least!) teaching them to
use recursion.
Beauty and Joy of Computing
• Half lab-based
programming
• Half social context of
computing
http://bjc.berkeley.edu
BJC in one slide
• Big Ideas of Programming • Big Ideas of Computing
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Abstraction
Algorithms
Recursion
Functions-as-data
Programming Paradigms
Concurrency
Distributed Computing
• Beauty and Joy
– “CS Unplugged” activities
– All lab work in pairs
– Two 3-week projects in pairs
• Of their own choice!!
– One 3-page paper
• Of their own choice!!
– How Stuff Works
• 3D Graphics
• Video Games (expanded at
UNCC)
• Computational Game Theory
– Research Summaries
• AI
• HCI
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Apps that Changed the World
Social Implications of Computing
Saving the World with Computing
How Twitter Works (guest lecture)
Cloud Computing
Limits of Computing
Future of Computing
Summer Teacher Workshops
FRABJOUS CS:
NSF-funded project
(grants 1138596,
1143566) pays our
expenses and teacher
stipends for five sixweek summer
workshops on teaching
BJC in high schools.
Three of the five are
happening this summer!
More than two groups are
already interested for next
summer!
So… We’ll come to you if
you have 15-20 high
school teachers whose
schools will let them teach
BJC, and you raise funds
for teacher stipends. We
can pay our travel
expenses.
Summer Teacher Workshops
Each workshop includes
• One face-to-face
week.
• Four weeks taking
the BJC course
online, with one halfday discussion each
week (participants
face to face, Berkeley
TA
videoconferencing).
• A final face-to-face
three days.
This is pretty much a
full-time commitment for
six weeks. Our stipend
budget ($2000 per
participant) isn’t enough
to justify anyone doing
this for the money!
Procedures (Make a Block)
Now in Scratch 2.0!
Recursion
Procedure as Data
Object Oriented Programming
The course:
http://bjc.berkeley.edu
The software:
http://snap.berkeley.edu
Run the alpha version now:
http://snap.berkeley.edu/run