Encoding Data - With interactive notebooks!

I think it's official, Unit 2 (chapter 1) is maybe my favorite part of code.org's AP CSP curriculum!

I cannot imagine a better way to get students actually excited to compress text than with their text compression widget!  Students would have done that all week had I let them!

I also love the favicon project that students do at the end of the chapter.  I used padlet to show the students' work as they finished and to let other hours see what they were doing.  That strategy worked really well since students put a lot more work/creativity into their projects when they saw others' work and knew it was going to be displayed.  You can find the padlet link here.  I am hoping I can print these out and make a quilt of sorts to display in class.  I just need to find time to do that.  Overall, I am really happy with the level of creativity students had - sometimes I feel like the down side of teaching rule followers is that they don't know how to think outside the box, but after seeing this, I am REALLY excited to see what they do during programming.

This unit I also continued my trend with interactive notebooks.   I've gotta say that these were lower on the "interactive" side of things BUT I think doing these is helping students document their learning.

Here is my pages from this unit.

Here is the table of contents - thanks to Sarah Hagen!

I wish I could have put all my number systems items together in the notebook but students weren't ready to hear about hex until now.  They all follow the same set-up with the hopes of showing students that different base number systems are not scary.

The two above go together - this is probably the most important page.  I should have probably talked about abstraction here too... next year! 

A little mnemonic device for remembering file sizes.  Students were a little grossed out about Billy Bob.

We recapped talking about pictures here... I honestly would love to maybe do one more page where they practice identifying colors and hex.  I don't think that will be a huge part of the AP exam but it definitely shows their understanding of the concept.

AND... sometimes you just need a page to throw in those "extras" - I tried relating it back to the code.org videos where ever possible.  I should probably give examples on this page too. Otherwise, all of this information is from EKs in the curriculum framework.

Since I believe that sharing is caring, you can find all the google docs in this file. 

I surveyed students on their thoughts about interactive notebooks and got mostly positive results - about 20% are kinda disinterested in them after our first unit, I am hoping that for the AP test they are going to be more enthusiastic about them.

Here is what I asked them:

Here are the results... they go in order of the questions asked above.

I will take those results.  I think the real test will come in May to determine how helpful these notes were.

Next I am skipping ahead to Unit 3 - Intro to programming.  I have NO idea what those pages will look like.  I might use some vocabulary pages or maybe do some examples with reading code examples.  I think for the programming unit, daily reflections might be more important than the notes I actually give students since we are building skills more than we are building an "information knowledge" base.