Background: At its meeting last fall, the AP CS Test Development Committee agreed to seek feedback from many groups on materials and ideas related to the transition of AP CS from Pascal to C++. For example, AP CS will hold two sessions at the SIGCSE Symposium in Philadelphia on Thursday, February 15, 1996:

• A panel, Advanced Placement and C++: Opening a Dialogue, is scheduled for 3:30 pm to present a status report, to present draft materials and to begin discussion.

• A Birds-Of-A-Feather Session, AP Computer Science: Directions and Dialogue, is scheduled for 7:15 pm to provide an opportunity for discussion to continue.

Meeting Report: In preparation for these feedback sessions, the AP CS Ad Hoc Committee spent much of its time during the January meeting on drafting and revising appropriate materials. These materials will be reviewed by the AP CS Test Development Committee during its meeting January 18-21, 1996.

Specifically, the January meeting of the AP CS Ad Hoc Committee focused upon the following:

• A draft of C++ topics for inclusion on the AP CS A and on the AP CS AB examinations.
  • Since C++ is a large, complex language, the AP CS courses and examinations will work with a well-defined subset.
  • Emphasis will be placed on elements of C++ that can be reasonably clear, clean, and safe (e.g., range-checking for arrays).
  • Specific C++ topics in the AP CS Course Description were divided into the following areas: Classes, Properties of Languages, and Stream Properties.
  • Several C++ topics were identified as specifically not to be covered in AP CS.
  • Other C++ topics will be mentioned as troublesome (so that AP CS instructors may wish to specifically avoid these areas).

• A draft of specific C++ classes (for strings, vectors, matrices, stacks, and queues) for use within AP CS.
  • While the proposed ANSI Standard for C++ includes an extensive Standard Template Library (STL), its size and complexity seems too great for introductory students.
  • A String class will contain a subset of capabilities from the STL, so that reasonable string manipulations are possible without many of the subtleties and complexities of the full STL.
  • Vector and Matrix classes will perform range checking, in contrast to standard arrays in C++.
  • Stack and Queue classes will include a reasonably small collection of standard operations which perform reasonable error checking.

While discussion of the above topics took most of the time, the AP CS Ad Hoc Committee also discussed the following points.

• Since the change to C++ will require considerable time and effort on the part of teachers, AP CS does not want to compound the transition by making significant other changes in the course descriptions at the present time. Representatives of the AP CS Test Development Committee did express an interest in opening the course syllabus up for wider discussion in the future, but it would like to defer such discussions to a later date.

• Teacher training will require a major effort for a successful transition to C++. At least four types of activities or materials were mentioned during this meeting:
  • the AP CS Teachers' Guide,
  • possible self-paced materials (perhaps on CD-ROM) for teachers to learn C++,
  • workshops run by the College Board, and
  • summer programs run by various colleges and universities and sometimes advertised through the College Board.

  In considering these types of support, AP CS is planning to support the AP CS Teachers' Guide and the College Board workshops. For example, budgets are being developed to include training sessions for AP CS consultants, so these consultants will be informed when they run the College Board workshops.

  The College Board, in practice, has very little control over commercial materials or summer programs that might be available. There was much discussion concerning how such support might be encouraged and how outside groups might be guided in following the AP CS Course Descriptions.

  While the Ad Hoc Committee stressed the vital importance of teacher training, time constraints did not allow extensive discussion of this area. Several people indicated the need to consider this topic in considerably more detail at the next meeting in April.

• Since the AP CS Ad Hoc Committee was appointed for a single year, the April meeting will be its last. At that time, there will be a need to consider what progress has been made and what work should continue. In particular, the Committee may want to recommend some type of on-going structure to continue communication between AP CS and the CS community as a whole.

Suggestions concerning this World Wide Web page also are welcome.

Henry M. Walker (walker@math.grin.edu)