• BJC, The Beauty and Joy of Computing, is an exciting new version of the AP CS : Principles course. Computing has changed the world in profound ways. It has opened up wonderful new ways for people to connect, design, research, play, create, and express themselves. However, just using a computer is only a small part of the picture. The real transformative and empowering experience comes when one learns how to program the computer, to translate ideas into code. This course will teach students how to do exactly that, using BYOB and Snap! (based on Scratch), one of the friendliest programming languages ever invented. It's purely graphical, which means programming involves simply dragging blocks around, and building bigger blocks out of smaller blocks.

    But this course is far more than just learning to program. We'll focus on some of the "Big Ideas" of computing, such as abstraction, design, recursion, concurrency, simulations, and the limits of computation. We'll show some beautiful applications of computing that have changed the world, talk about the history of computing, and where it will go in the future. Throughout the course, relevance will be emphasized: relevance to the student and to society. As an example, the final project will be completely of the students' choosing, on a topic most interesting to them. The overarching theme is to expose students to the beauty and joy of computing. This course is designed for computing non-majors, although interested majors are certainly welcome to take the class as well! We are especially excited about bringing computing (through this course) to traditionally under-represented groups in computing, i.e., women and ethnic minorities.

       We provide all the resources any High School teacher would need to teach the course successfully, at no cost to students or faculty

    • Videos of all of our lectures, in 1080p high definition, with clicker questions embedded in the videos
    • All the source files for the lecture notes (powerpoint, pdf, movies)
    • A Moodle site that drives all of our lab activities (in lieu of a book)
    • Videos of one of our star teachers doing every lab activity and talking about it ala Khan Academy
    • All the software you'd need for the course (Snap!)
    • All the exams we've ever written (source Word file and pdfs)
    • Recruiting matrerials
    • Software