ACSL Junior Division

Published October 13, 2023

This academic year, I coached two ACSL teams - my third grader's ACSL Elementary Division team and my sixth grader's ACSL Junior Division team. This is my second year teaching ACSL. Last year, I coached my daughter's ACSL Elementary Division team.

ACSL American Computer Science League

Previous Year's ACSL topics:

To understand and participate in the ACSL Junior Division, the student should have studied ACSL Elementary topics the previous year. If he/she has not studied, it would be best to spend a month or two getting familiar with ACSL Elementary topics. This is my previous blog post about coaching ACSL Elementary kids.

Programming Language:

It would also help to have a basic understanding about one of these languages - Python 3, C++ or Java. These are the languages of choice in ACSL Junior.

Schedule

There are four topics in ACSL Junior Division. Each topic is about 4-5 weeks long.

At the end of each topic, there is a 30-minute Short Problem exam, where the student gets to answer 5 questions.

There is also a 72-hour long Programming Problem exam. Once started, the clock timer starts ticking.

After all the ACSL exams are completed, there is a final exam for high scorers. This final exam usually lasts the whole day and involves all the topics and two programs.

Topics

The four main topics are:

  • Number Systems
  • Prefix/Postfix Notation
  • Boolean Algebra
  • Graph Theory

Extra TOPICS

  • What Does This Program Do? This is a new section that contains pseudocode. The student is asked to compute the output of this program or the value of variables upon execution.
  • New topics related to electronics such as LSHIFT, RSHIFT, LCIRC, RCIRC
  • Digital Electronics - this is a diagrammatical representation of Boolean Algebra equations.

Related Posts

If you have any questions, please contact me at arulbOsutkNiqlzziyties@gNqmaizl.bkcom. You can also post questions in our Facebook group. Thank you.

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Last Updated: October 13, 2023.     This post was originally written on May 19, 2021.