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Lab Resource Page

The AP Computer Science A course requires a minimum of 20 hours of hands-on lab experiences.

Three AP Computer Science A labs are available as exemplars to support the implementation of at least 20 hours of hands-on lab work in the classroom. Student guides are available below. Teacher guides with solutions are available through teachers’ AP Course Audit accounts.

These three labs are not required. Teachers may modify and implement these labs and can also use other comparable labs and resources to meet the 20-hour lab requirement.

The AP Computer Science A Exam will not have specific questions that focus on the AP Computer Science A labs and will continue to assess the concepts and skills outlined in the Course Description. Practice exams are available for teachers through their AP Course Audit accounts.

Student Lab Guides

  • AP Computer Science A Consumer Review Lab Student Guide (.pdf)
    The persuasive power of words can be seen in a variety of places such as entertainment, news, social media, and even reviews and comments. Students learn about sentiment value and how this can be used to construct or modify a review to be more positive or negative using String manipulation.

  • AP Computer Science A Data Lab Student Guide (.pdf)
    In this lab students will discuss the importance of data in making decisions, learn how to setup and use a third party library for data collection, and how to process this data once it has been read in to a program. They will put these skills together to find relevant data and answer a specific question of interest.

  • AP Computer Science A Steganography Lab Student Guide (.pdf)
    Steganography is the practice of concealing messages or information within other non-secret text or data. Students will use the same code from Picture Lab to explore the concepts of steganography and 2D arrays, hiding images or text inside of other images.

  • AP Computer Science A Celebrity Lab Student Guide (.pdf)
    Students will discuss class design as it relates to the game Celebrity, where a person or team tries to guess the name of a celebrity from a given clue or set of clues. This lab includes inheritance as the basis for one of the activities, and also includes a Graphical User Interface.

  • AP Computer Science A Elevens Lab Student Guide (.pdf/409KB)
    This activity is related to a simple solitaire game called Elevens. Students learn the rules of Elevens, and then play it using the supplied Graphical User Interface (GUI).

  • AP Computer Science A Magpie Chatbot Lab Student Guide (.pdf/171KB)
    Students explore some of the basics of Natural Language Processing. As they explore, they will work with a variety of methods of the String class and practice using if statements. Students will trace a complicated method to find words in user input.

  • AP Computer Science A Picture Lab Student Guide (.pdf/409KB)
    Students write methods that modify digital pictures. In writing these methods, they will learn how to traverse a two-dimensional array of integers or objects. Students will also be introduced to nested loops, binary numbers, interfaces, and inheritance.

Teacher Lab Guides

AP Computer Science A Teacher Lab Guides (with solutions) can be accessed by logging into your AP Course Audit account.