The self-paced AP CS A course teaches you Java. This cohort teaches you to build something with it, which is a related but genuinely different skill, and the one that survives the exam.

Sixteen students, sixteen weeks, one project each. You choose it in week two, design it in week three, and spend the rest of the term building it in public — with the cohort reading your code every fortnight and telling you what they cannot follow.

The project

Yours, chosen by you, approved by me for scope. The most common failure in week two is ambition, and the single most useful thing I do all term is talk people down from an idea that would take a year into one they can finish and be proud of.

• Past cohorts have built: a chess engine that plays badly but legally

• A gradebook with a real file format and a migration path between versions

• A text adventure with a scripting language for its own rooms

• A transit-route finder over real published timetable data

• A drum-machine sequencer

• A study-timer that logs to a file and draws its own charts

Code review, every fortnight

1. You push your work and open it for review on the Sunday

2. Two assigned cohort members read it and leave written comments before Tuesday

3. In the session, one project is reviewed live by the whole group for twenty minutes

4. You respond to the comments you agree with and argue with the ones you do not, in writing

Being read is uncomfortable in week four and normal by week eight. Learning to say 'I could not follow this method' politely, and to hear it without rewriting everything in a panic, is the professional skill hiding inside this course.

And the exam

The AP exam is in May and this cohort ends in early May, deliberately. The last three sessions turn fully to exam preparation — the four free-response question types, timed, marked against the rubric. Students who have spent fifteen weeks writing real classes find the free-response section noticeably easier than students who have only studied for it.

Enrolment opens 1 October 2026 for a January start. Sixteen seats. If you need the Java basics first, the self-paced course is the intended route in and finishing it by December is comfortable.