- For example, when creating a rectangle class, tell students that the company you work for isn’t happy with the existing Java Rectangle class and it needs new functionality such as getArea().
- If some students are interested in making video games, show them how hey could make an animated rectangle, to show how what they’re doing connects to making video games.
- File I/O isn’t on the AP guidelines, but consider introducing it anyway as students may be curious about saving a "high scores" list in a video game.
- Tell students that Google wants to know the frequencies of the letters in a book, and which letter of the alphabet is most popular so they can display the answers in search results.
- You’ll need to find a short book as a text file online for this activity.
- Have students create a program to read through the book and count the frequencies of each letter.
- This is a relatively boring task, but with the backstory students become interested and the task is suddenly exciting.