Study Cards I made last year

Last year, I took the AP Computer Science Principles Exam. I made some cards for review of some topics that I had struggled on/had an interest in. Let’s take a look!

Abstraction

This is a key term I saw constantly last year. It’s in a lot of the code as well; procedures need to be complex, and demonstrate some form of abstraction, which you could do with just nesting if statements in if statements. It’s a vital concept rather than just a key term.

Bandwidth

Have you ever been on discord?



Data being transferred at certain speeds is something important to… everything. If a webpage takes too long to load, you close it and that business has lost your business. If the StarBucks wifi you’re on is too slow, the data isn’t coming to you fast enough, you go to the library instead. Productivity. Efficiency. Speed. If you can’t transmit a lot of data in a certain amount of time, what are you doing?

Heuristic

This was entirely new to me at the time of making, but it’s a good term to remember.

Hexadecimal

I remember on the test having to go from binary to decimal to hex and back. It’s a good system to know.

“Internet Words”

I put all of these into a category, but they’re all individual things to learn.

Lossy vs. Lossless Compression

This is really important! Not on the test, it’s only one question. But I’ve used this a lot. When do I need a high quality image versus a bunch of pictrueres that’ll have to be compressed so I can fit it all into one blog post?? PNG, JPEG, JPG, GIF??

Metadata

I haven’t seen metadata since that class, but it’s good to know the prefix of meta, given the company Meta and all, and of course, you need to know what data means.

Pixel

To be honest, I made this one for fun. Give it a look though!

RGB

I use this a lot as an artist, when picking colors. There is a few systems, like HSL or RGB, but RGB is definitely one of the most popular.

Final Thoughts

Although these are low res and super old, it’s an interesting memory of a time where I crammed for a exam I prepared all year for. Good luck to those in AP season right now, and thank you for reading :)