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First of all, the class certainly prepared us for the AP, without question. (Not that that's a very big accomplishment, I certainly hope the AP does not accurately represent the content covered in a college class.) Second of all, despite any problems I had with the class, I very much enjoyed it as a whole.


This class should not be any simpler. In the description for the course it says that computer science requires prior knowledge of java/another language. If anybody requires a longer introduction than the one given, then they should take computer programming first. I understand that oop and programming in general can be hard to teach, but if somebody is having difficulty learning about them they should instead take an introductory course. If the course were any simpler, it would seriously deter those who did understand the concepts. 


Although self-motivated projects are inherently engaging, teacher guided projects will always be faster and ultimately more informative. Self guided projects are usually guided through online resources, and thus there is no guarantee I will be able to finish said projects. The guidance of a teacher, or at least a single well-written walkthrough, will both increase the productivity of a student on a project and what a student learns from a project. This leads into my next idea,


Have more projects. Pong was fun to do; having a clear set goal for a project, and the knowledge that I have to finish said project, is extremely fun. More so, everybody was working on the same project, and so getting advice on an issue was extremely easy. Pong itself was relatively simple, more complex projects would certainly be welcome, especially if it required a lot of thinking about how to efficiently code the program. There was little effort actually put into the general method I would use to make pong work, instead the challenge was simply working out bugs.


Not enough focus on efficiency and general coding practices. In the first coding class I took, I was told that the question is not whether you can make a program do something, it's whether you can me it efficient. This isn't really something that was ever mentioned in this class. The use of profilers, for example, to find computationally heavy spots in code should definitely be talked about in class.