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Intro to Unit 1

  • Lesson
  • 3 min read
  • 1 of 8 in this chapter

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Welcome!

Hi! Welcome to the STEMpump AP Computer Science A course. This course is designed to help you if you are:

  • studying for the AP Exam
  • stuck on a concept
  • wanting to learn about Java

If you aren't doing any of the above, no worries; The course is a great intro to the realm of Computer Science using Java. That said, this course will focus heavily on the concepts tested on the AP Exam or in our class. If you want to learn about Java specifically, check out our Java course.

The Course

This course is broken up into 8 chapters/units that correspond to the units outlined by College Board. In fact, they correspond directly to remove any confusion.

Here's the outline College Board gives:

Unit 1: Primitive Types

You’ll learn the fundamentals of Java, a programming language, as well as other foundational concepts for coding.

Unit 2: Using Objects

You’ll explore reference data as a way to represent real-world objects in a digital world and discover methods to perform more complex operations.

Unit 3: Boolean Expressions and if Statements

You’ll delve into the building blocks of algorithms and focus on using conditional statements to solve problems and control results.

Unit 4: Iteration

You’ll learn about iteration, another building block of algorithms that are for repetition.

Unit 5: Writing Classes

You’ll explore how real-world interactions can be expressed digitally by organizing behaviors and attributes into classes, and you’ll examine the legal and ethical implications of computer programming.

Unit 6: Array

You’ll learn techniques and standard algorithms to work with collections of related data, known as data structures.

Unit 7: ArrayList

You’ll delve deeper into data sets, exploring ArrayList objects for larger amounts of data, as well as the privacy concerns related to personal data storage.

Unit 8: 2D Array

Now that you’ve explored 1D arrays, you’ll branch out into 2D arrays and experiment with data sets represented in a table.

Unit 9: Inheritance

You’ll learn how to manipulate programming without altering existing code by using subclasses to create a hierarchy.

Unit 10: Recursion

You’ll work on solving larger problems by solving smaller, simpler versions of the same problem using recursive methods.

If you already know the concept, great! Go on, and maybe try a quiz or project. Quizzes and projects are great ways to test what you know, and we've designed these with the AP test in mind. (You may see some AP questions from previous tests.)

Primitive Types

We will start every chapter with a brief outline and information given from College Board.

Topics may include:

  • Primitive data types including int, double, and boolean
  • Evaluating arithmetic expressions in program code
  • Using assignment operators to produce a value
  • How variables and operators are sequenced and combined in an expression to create a result

On The Exam

2.5%–5% of exam score

Ready to get started? Great 😄 We'll start this unit getting used to Java and Primitive Types.