This course is a workshop, not a lecture. Most days you will build, break, and repair something, and ideas get their proper names after you have run into the need for them. That much is inherited from Grade 11. What is new is that the code on the bench is rarely only yours.
graph LR A["Warm-up"] --> B["Build or investigate"] B --> C["Review someone<br/>else's change"] C --> D["Compare and name it"] D --> E["Commit it"] E --> F["Log the decision"]
Warm-up
Five minutes at the door: a Predict the Output on the board, a Read the Diff you have to approve or refuse, a Trace It on a recursive call. Small daily reps compound faster than anything else in this course and cost almost nothing.
Build or investigate
The heart of the period. Some days you build; some days you are given a working program nobody in the room wrote and have to find out what it does. The first class of the course is the second kind, on purpose — see The Inherited Program — because reading code somebody else wrote is not a punishment or a warm-up for real work. It is the work, and it is the thing that makes Grade 12 different from a bigger Grade 11.
The problem still arrives before the technique. You will search a list badly enough to care about the alternative before anybody says “binary search”, and you will lose an afternoon to a shared list before anybody says “aliasing”.
Review someone else’s change
Most days end with somebody’s change on the board or on a screen and the question: what does this do, and would you approve it? Reviewing is a taught skill in this course, with sentences you can borrow, and the rule that never bends is in Our Classroom Norms — the review is about the code, never about the person who wrote it.
Compare and name it
We tour what different groups did: different designs for the same problem, different diagnoses of the same bug, different algorithms with different timings. Only then does the idea get its clean statement on a concept page.
Commit it
From Unit 4 onwards, and earlier if your team is ready, work ends with a commit: a small, named, permanent snapshot with a message saying why. Using Version Control teaches the mechanics. The habit matters beyond the tool — it is what makes your individual contribution visible inside a team project.
Log the decision
The last minutes belong to your Code Journal. This semester it asks for one thing Grade 11 did not: the decision you made and the options you turned down. The code and the commit history will still be there at the end of the course. The reasons will not, unless you write them.
The thread through all of it
Grade 11 asked “who is this for?” and never let it go. That question is still here, with a second one behind it: who has to live with this after we go? The Software Project is a team build for a real community partner, and the course ends with The Handover — handing it over properly, to somebody who has to keep it working without you. That is not a ceremony at the end. It is the reason for the rest of it.
If you were away
Check the class page, run the warm-up yourself, then update your copy of the project before you write a line. Starting from a three-day-old copy is the single most reliable way to create a merge conflict nobody enjoys.
Curriculum connection
D4.4
evaluate their own development of Essential Skills and work habits that are important for success in computer studies, as identified in the Ontario Skills Passport.
Link to original