AP Computer Science A (Mocha) October Updates

This month we made some updates to the AP Computer Science A course to better prepare students for the AP exam.

New College Board Labs

We are in the process of adding the new labs released in August from College Board. This month, we added the Consumer Review Lab and the Celebrity Lab. You will find these in the supplemental material. See below for more details

Mocha is now aligned to the College Board Standards

October was focused on closing the gaps in Mocha to the new AP CSA standards. You will find that there are many small changes as well as a bunch of additional activities that can be found in the supplemental material.

Smaller changes

Many of the changes that were made included adding additional detail to slides/videos and examples. These were done in the following exercises:

• 2.2 — Variables and Types
• 2.5 — Casting
• 2.10 — While Loop
• 3.3 — Methods and Return Values
• 3.4 — JavaDocs and More Methods
• 4.3 — Using a Class as a Client
• 4.4 — Writing Classes
• 4.11 — Objects vs Primitives
• 4.12 — Inheritance
• 4.14 — Polymorphism
• 5.2 — Introduction to Arrays

Larger changes

In addition to these smaller changes, 71 new activities were added in the supplemental material spread out over 9 lessons. You will find these under the module titled Additional Topics for the AP Exam.

To find the best place to plug all of these new activities into your curriculum, please check out the Mocha syllabus. https://codehs.com/syllabus/mocha

Lesson Plan Updates

Lesson plans are in the process of being reviewed and updated. We are starting with Module 4, Classes and Object-Oriented Programming. To date, lessons 1 through 4 have been updated, including new handouts.