I’ve been working on the AP Computer Science A course for the better part of 2025, from the planning, to the start of the curriculum preparation, to the last 6 months of teaching, to where I am now. I just began teaching Unit 8 – 2D Arrays. My students are sharp and they’re experienced enough that the material is easy for them. They’re increasingly commenting on how ‘easy!!!’ it is. Maybe that’s a sign that I’ve done my job well. But I’d rather take it as a sign that I need to make improvements.
Well, obviously I need to make improvements.
Having already finished creating the curriculum for the course, I’m now looping back through and working on the 2nd iteration. The first teach-through let me see what was horrible – what bombed, looked ugly, or was grossly lacking. So now I’m grinding out the most obvious flaws. I’m focusing on:
- Improving the lectures – Aesthetics, lesson flow, the addition of bell ringers, lesson recap questions, end-of-lesson mini-coding activities, etc. Essentially, I want the lessons to make better sense, give more practice, and look better.
- Create more labs — The AP Computer Science A course should have at least 20 hours of in-class coding labs. These require lecture slides, lab worksheets, and source code adapted for the lab instructional format.
- Improving assignments – Standard homework, coding projects, quizzes, tests, etc. These need to all fit within our branding, look better, and generally be more effective. Often they need to be more challenging, although some are over the top and need to be moderated.
- Keys, rubrics, and output templates – Every assignment needs an answer key, a rubric aligned with the AP grading format, and an output template for returning the student’s grade and feedback. These all are standardized in such a way that we can semi-automate grading with AI assistance, etc.
- Teacher’s guides – Every lesson, be it a lecture or lab, needs a teacher guide that quickly brings teachers up to speed and outlines objectives and a pacing framework. Additionally, every unit has a synopsis document that lets teachers know what to expect and look out for, as well as lists all the relevant documents in the respective unit.
The work is tedious and repetitive. Thankfully AI tools help speed things along at a pace many multiples faster than what it would be without them. Nevertheless, I’m the only human working on this all. It’s a LOT of work. Despite the huge improvement over the 1st iteration (at least in my eyes), I know that there will be many iterations to come, assuming this sells as I intend/hope/pray for it to in 2026. And despite what I think is a huge improvement, I can’t be sure it’s moving in the right direction because it’s just me that’s using it. Like with any product, real improvement must come in response to user feedback. In my case, that’s other teachers and schools.
I’m iterating in a silo. It’s a lonely mission. I don’t know if it’s missing important elements. I don’t know if the material is unclear. Maybe it looks awful (aesthetics isn’t a strength of mine). I don’t know if it will ever even see the light of day. Nevertheless, I grind at it, because it must be done, if for no other reason than I know it can be better, and so must be improved. My mother used to tell me that in everything I do, I should do it as if unto God. So God, if you have some spare time, could you give my curriculum a look and give me some constructive feedback? It would be much appreciated.