Comment Coming from a High School CS Student (Score 2) 633
I took AP Comp Sci last year from one the best teacher ever! He's also been around AP CompSci forever (since 1985). He is an AP Grader too. So we definitly got one of the best AP CompSci teachers there as.
As far as AP curriculum, it's all in C++. Nothing real crazy is involved. First year students need to know basic class structure, arrays, matrices, but nothing even touch pointers or data structures. We're talking VERY basic. The AP Board even makes an easy to us apstring class so that students don't have to deal with pointers in strings either. The focus is on the algorithms.
As for the second year students they get a little bit more. You learn pointers, basic data structures (linked lists, doubly-linked lists, binary trees) and learn new sorting algorithms. You still don't touch any powerful features of C++ such as the STL, class inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
To keep myself busy in that class and not become bored I used to play with the graphics package that we had. It was severely limited but I was still able to create a primitive (VERY primitive) 3d engine that could draw cubes and tetrahedrens and rotate them. Another fun activity that we did was draw fractals with recursion. You can get some unusual results especially add in color.
Well that's what my experience with AP Comp Sci is.
As far as AP curriculum, it's all in C++. Nothing real crazy is involved. First year students need to know basic class structure, arrays, matrices, but nothing even touch pointers or data structures. We're talking VERY basic. The AP Board even makes an easy to us apstring class so that students don't have to deal with pointers in strings either. The focus is on the algorithms.
As for the second year students they get a little bit more. You learn pointers, basic data structures (linked lists, doubly-linked lists, binary trees) and learn new sorting algorithms. You still don't touch any powerful features of C++ such as the STL, class inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
To keep myself busy in that class and not become bored I used to play with the graphics package that we had. It was severely limited but I was still able to create a primitive (VERY primitive) 3d engine that could draw cubes and tetrahedrens and rotate them. Another fun activity that we did was draw fractals with recursion. You can get some unusual results especially add in color.
Well that's what my experience with AP Comp Sci is.
