<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Litvin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:litvin@skylit.com">litvin@skylit.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">What might this new exam be like? CS with no programming and no math? We'll see. My guess is, if it eventually comes about, it will be a no-specific-programming-language exam, which will simply replace the current AP CS exam in Java. I believe two AP CS exams will be untenable.<br>
<br>Gary Litvin<br><a href="http://www.skylit.com/" target="_blank">www.skylit.com</a><br><br></blockquote>
<div>In the interim, I think we should use the breathing room. Here's an opportunity for a local community to synthesize a new mix, without getting into lockstep.
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<div>Innovation, not conformity, is what we're needing right now. </div></div>
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<div>Let's imagine a math class, one that satisfies a year requirement, that is not AP anything. Think of Trig or Statistics, or even Algebra 2.</div>
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<div>I like that MFTDA starts right off the bat with the traditional Algebra topic of functions as mappings, goes over the concepts of domain, range, co-domain, inverse function, many to one. Clearly this is mathematics.</div>
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<div>But then, because of our commitment to teaching "how things work", we don't stay in the clouds. We start answering the question "what's this good for?" right away.</div>
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<div>We talk about reverse lookup phone books, mapping human languages with Unicode, storing and retrieving data in tables (one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many). We make our topic real, concrete, applicable. We write little functions in Python, we talk about Python dictionaries as mappings.</div>
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<div>If only our everyday Algebra course were a lot more like this one... that's what we're after in many cases: a more fulfulling way to approach a lot of the same topics we already cover, but in ways that haven't been updated in decades.</div>
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<div>Kirby</div>
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