1.1.1. Preface¶
CSAwesome is a free AP CSA curriculum that is endorsed by the College Board as an official AP CSA curriculum and PD provider. It was created in 2019 by adapting the AP CSA Java Review e-book written by Dr. Barbara Ericson, while she was a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech, currently Assistant Professor of Information at University of Michigan.
Dr. Beryl Hoffman, Professor of Computer Science at Elms College, MA, created and adapted the CSAwesome curriculum to follow the College Board CSA 2019 guidelines with the support of a 2019 Google CS-ER grant and the Mobile CSP project (https://www.mobile-csp.org) to help transition students and teachers from AP CSP to AP CSA. Special thanks to Barb Ericson, Beth Simon, Colleen Lewis (for her awesome Java memory model videos), John Figliulo, Pauline Lake, Jennifer Rosato, Kim Evelti, Becky Stacey, Art Lopez, Kyle Gillette, and Peter Bowers for feedback, edits, and ideas.
In the summer of 2020, CSA teacher extraordinaire Kate McDonnell from Cherry Creek Schools in CO created a JUnit test code suite for our Java servers to provide feedback to students in every active code. Many volunteers including Pat Clark, Emma Brown, Emma Pinnell, Megha Sharma, Arjun Balaji, and Anvita Gollu helped to add many junit tests to each active code to make them auto-gradable.
In the summer of 2023, Peter Seibel, author, software developer, and Berkeley High School AP CSA teacher, began making valuable improvements to the CSAwesome text and Runestone platform.
If you see errors or bugs, please report them with this form.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the use of the Runestone platform and Jobe servers run by Brad Miller, and the past use of the Jobe server from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Special thanks also to the following people that we have collaborated with:
Jeff (Jochen) Rick made great contributions to the Parsons problems (mixed up code problems).
Philip Guo who created the Java Visualizer, which we use in the e-book.
Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan for hosting us all at the summer 2016 hackathon for Runestone Interactive and for his input into the design of the instructor dashboard.
Brad Miller and David Ranum and the students at Luther College, who created the Runestone Interactive platform. Brad Miller has been keeping it going for years.
Thank you also to the National Science Foundation for supporting our ebook work through several grants: Grant No. 1432300, 1138378, and 1228352.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Google has supported this work through their Google RISE Awards: TFR14-03256, TFR14-00363, and TFR-16-01052. They have also supported our efforts to help more under-represented students succeed in their AP CSA courses and on the exam.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Google.
Contributors
The following people have contributed to this ebook:
Several students at Georgia Tech have helped review the eBook:
Emily Cahil
Bre’Ana Deen
Kantwon Rogers
Hemanth Koralla
Ikenna Omekam
Gabriel Galarza
Ja’Quan Taylor
Nimish Todi
Ashraf Younis
Sana Ajani
Yamini Nambiar
Andrew Teachout
Sydni Peterson
Bhavika Devnani
Stephanie Remy
Several students from the University of Michigan have contributed to the eBook * Emma Brown - unit tests * Emma Pinnell - unit tests * Kira Woodhouse - Added Peer Instruction questions
Several students at the University of California, San Diego have been involved in creating multiple choice questions for the EBook.
Matthew Crooks
Miranda Go
Valerie Hon
Sophia Krause-Levy
Shauna Sapper
Many others have been involved in the creation of content for the eBook (including high school students).
Atiba Nkosi Kee
Robert McKenzie - created videos explaining concepts (arrays, interfaces, searching)
Nicole Guobadia - created videos explaining concepts (recursion)
Daniel Boaitey - created free response videos from 2014 questions.
Christy Zachary - created free response videos and Java executable examples
Javier Rodriguez - added a new exam (non-timed #1)
Gabby Jackson - added new exams (non-timed #2, #3, and #4)
Sofia Moin - added a video on variables
Gerald Nash - added many free response questions for arrays, 2D arrays, and lists
Sabrina Seibel - added free response question 4 from 2016 - StringFormatter and added questions to the code practice problems at the end of the 2d array chapter and the OO chapter.
Julian Hamelberg - worked on free response questions - seating chart A and B
Christine Hsieh - added mixed up code problems at the end of the array chapter and code practice problems
Carlos Diaz - fixed problems and added code highlights
Avery Rosh - found an error in one of the 2D array questions
JP Fasano - found an error in one of the non-timed exams
Srikar Yendapally - added code problems to the 2D array chapter
Kiran Ruston - added new questions to the free response problems at the end of the ebook.
Arvindh Manian — formatted video interviews into the Stories unit of the ebook
Sanjana Duttagupta - added Peer Instruction questions from http://peerinstruction4cs.com/
License
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Barbara Ericson barbarer@umich.edu 2014-2024 All rights reserved.
Beryl Hoffman hoffmanb@elms.edu 2019-2024 All rights reserved.
Peter Seibel peterseibel@berkeley.net 2023-2024 All rights reserved.
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