Went to an AP thing today by Region 10. A.C.T. Summit and it was all good, and had fun stuff. I presented AP Computer Science and Gridworld second session.
The Keynote speaker has written books on over achieving kids, and had a lot of good ideas on how to deal with them and their parents.
I asked a question as I had had something interesting come up lately. I invited a dog agility mom to come to a Teacup trial and she said they wouldn’t because they were competing to get an AKC scholarship. Oh, and the kid is in 7th grade. Looked it up today and the scholarship is for $1000 – $5000 so I don’t really blame them.
Probably looks a little different on the college application too.
Went to the AP Statistics session taught by a colleague and it was VERY good. It also gave me a chance to polish up my presentation.
The AP CS was mostly math teachers, but we had fun anyway. I think the biggest thing they got out of it was that they didn’t ever want to teach CS.
The last session I attended was a general session on why kids take CS, basically a summary of a paper the presenter did for his PhD. Had some very interesting ideas, basically that the more kids think they will do well, the more they enroll in AP Courses, the better they do, etc.
He suggested that we encourage kids to take AP tests a second time (which is a game we used to play when we had two AP CS courses – which I mentioned).
And at the end, we both acknowledged that kid that signs up for AP CS is not only going to get into college but they are going to be successful.
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