AP Computer Science Principles case studies
AP Computer Science Principles · Put your knowledge to work in context.
AP Computer Science Principles is an introductory college-level computing course and exam administered by the College Board. It is designed to be equivalent to a first-semester introductory college computing course for non-CS majors, which makes it a natural fit for students who want breadth across the field rather than the deep Java focus of AP Computer Science A. The course asks students to design and evaluate solutions, build algorithms and programs, incorporate abstraction, use data to discover new knowledge, and explain how computing innovations and systems - including the internet - work, along with their potential impacts. Assessment has two parts. The AP Computer Science Principles case studies are 5 cases and about 2,209 words.
1The Caching Bug That Only Appears After Lunch
A student builds a program that looks up whether a username is already taken. On the first run each day it behaves correctly.
396 words, about 2 min2The Survey With a Missing Option
A team collects responses from 1,200 students about how they get to school. The form offers exactly four choices: car, bus, bike, walk.
391 words, about 2 min3The Speed Test That Slowed Everything Down
A school's network administrator notices that the internet feels slow between 11:00 and 13:00. To diagnose it, she runs an automated speed test from 60 lab machines every five minutes, each test downloading a 50 MB file from an external server.
403 words, about 2 min4The Recommendation Engine That Learned the Wrong Lesson
A district pilots a system that recommends practice problems to students. It was trained on historical data: which problems students attempted and which they completed successfully.
534 words, about 3 min5The Two Versions of the Same File
Two students collaborate on a program. Student A works on a laptop and edits a file called game.py for three hours, adding a scoring function and fixing a collision bug.
485 words, about 2 min