Week 1 (567)
Wednesday, 5 September 2018 (Regular Schedule)
Tuesday, 4 September 2018 (AM Assembly Schedule)
- English Conversation (all present and accounted for)
- Introductions
- Kensin Ayabe
- Ririka Kawasaki
- Akari Osawa
- Rei Sakai
- Ryoha Suzuki
- Takumi Yasui
- Charlotte's Web: "Where's papa going with that ax?"
- Introductions
- AP Computer Science A (all present and accounted for — and then one!)
- Introductions
- Fillip Cannard
- Jacob Engstrom
- Lucas Fischer
- QingLin (Will) Han
- Holden Hutley
- Andrew Kassab
- Brian Le
- Matthew Leslie
- Jackson Miller
- Kristian (pronounced like Christian) Peev
- Vasu Raguaram
- Lewis Tawney
- Shaw Xia
- Mr. Spurgeon talked a lot.
- Passed out student composition books (Journals) and explained that they are to stay in class or with Mr. Spurgeon until the end of the year. (Students should not take them out of the classroom.)
- Students asked great questions!
- (Great sharing by Vasu after class about his summer programming experiences!)
- Introductions
- AP Computer Science Principles (all present and accounted for)
- Introductions
- Ethan Bardon
- Jaden Bathan
- Ishaan Bhutani
- Khanh Nguyen
- Monisha Prasad
- Asmita Pun
- Yuhao Sun
- Jiaxi (CC) Wang
- Yu (Shaw) Xia — Second appearance in one day!
- Introductions
Wednesday, 12 September 2018 (Regular Schedule)
Excerpt from an email sent by Mr. Kipp Johnson, head of the math department at VCHS, to Mr. Spurgeon on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 at 5:51 AM:
[S]tudents may have the idea that the normal amount of effort is 100% and is deserving of an A+. We all (if we’ve thought about it at all) know that for most of [us] our normal effort is about 71.3%. And please do stress to them that their competition is working a lot harder than they are. Their competition, I hope they realize, is not the other students from Valley Catholic. It’s the young kids, wherever they are, who don’t just play video games all day. They’ve learned to create their own video games by mastering some computer language and using every spare moment to learn more.
AP Computer Science in-class review activity (12 Sep 18).
In your journal, answer the following questions. Use complete sentences. Be clear. Be concise. Use property capitalization and punctuation. And answer in such a way that the original question is at least suggested if not obvious. For example, if the question was What color is the sky?, then a bad answer would be blue. A better answer would be The sky is blue.
- What are the five characteristics of an algorithm according to Donald Knuth? Be quantitative when discussing inputs and outputs.
- What is a computational method?
- What is a program?
- How much of your textbook or textbooks have you read so far?
- Do you know how to write a "Hello, World" program in either Java, JavaScript, or some other programming language? If so, do so now in your journal. Write more than one version in more than one language if you can.
- What programming projects are you currently working on, if any, outside of class right now?
- What does the word autodidact mean? Provide an example of an autodidact if you can.
- Which of the exercises at the end of the handout titled “Algorithms”, which Mr. Spurgeon put a lot of effort into preparing for you, have you attempted—other than any that may have been assigned or discussed in class already or covered by a quiz? If you haven't attempted any, which ones seem interesting to you? Have you read the entire handout yet? If not, why not?