AP Computer Science Principles

How computing works — the five big ideas

AP Computer Science Principles is the College Board's conceptual, language-agnostic introduction to computing — the course that asks not 'how do I write Java?' but 'how does computing actually work, and what does it do to the world?' This journey walks the five Big Ideas of the current CED: Creative Development, Data, Algorithms & Programming, Computer Systems & Networks, and Impact of Computing. You'll read and write the AP exam's pseudocode reference sheet, reason about the Internet and packets, weigh lossy against lossless compression, confront bias in data and the digital divide, and build toward the two things the exam grades: the 70-question end-of-course multiple-choice test and the Create Performance Task.