Computer Science I · Fall 2026 · McDonogh 35
Course Overview
Computer Science I is about being a serious student in an era when the tool that lets you skip all of it is one tab away. This course teaches you the discipline to work well anyway, using the same tool everyone else is using to work badly. The subject you practice on is AI itself: how it is built, what it can do, what it cannot, and how to tell the difference between real work and the shortcut that only looks like it.
What this course is
AI removes the barrier to learning something. It does not remove the barrier to performing it. You can ask a machine to write your essay, solve your equation, or summarize your reading. What you cannot ask it to do is sit in the room and take the test alone, or hold what you know when the tool is gone.
This course is the discipline that closes that gap. Four verbs run through everything you do here: directing a tool with a clear specification, reading what it produces, judging whether it holds up, and iterating — correcting the specification rather than patching the output. Those verbs are ways to build. They are also ways to study.
What you’ll walk out with
- The habit of telling your own work from slop — checking a source, a dataset, or an AI's output before you trust it, and before you pass it on.
- A study habit that survives every tool: know what you are asking for, read what came back, and judge it against what you actually needed.
- A specification you wrote, and a working thing built from it, deployed and live at a public web address.
- An SDD Portfolio: your specifications, what the machine generated, the audits you ran on it, and an honest account of what was yours.
- The disposition of the person who checks — you direct the tool, you inspect what it makes, and you don't hand your thinking to it.
How it works
The semester runs as three units. Foundations asks how AI systems are built, what from, where they run, and who steers them — and ends by deriving this class’s AI policy from what you wrote. Directing and Verifying puts two purpose-built tools in your hands and asks you to judge them, checking every time whether you can still do the thing without them. Building and Shipping is the long one: you write a specification, a machine builds from it, and you evaluate what came back — then amend the specification, never the code. Each class block splits into a short content segment and a longer lab, both run as a model / practice / do-it-yourself loop. The week-by-week lives on the calendar; the full structure and the standards behind each unit live on the roadmap.
Expectations & the room
The working agreements for this lab aren’t handed down — we build them together through the first activities of the course. Two pages hold the starting points:
Grading
Term grades follow InspireNOLA’s Pupil Progression Plan and break out three ways:
- 40%Major — Eight tests, biweekly — Aug 28, Sep 11, Sep 25, Oct 8, Oct 23, Nov 6, Nov 20, Dec 11.
- 40%Minor — Two weekly grades: daily work (Do Now + Exit Ticket, averaged over the number of activities that week) and classwork (build logs, spec drafts, verification runs, short writing, averaged over the number of classwork activities that week). Classwork is worth 1.5× the daily-work grade because the artifact is heavier.
- 20%Exam — Q1 is the midterm; Q2 is the average of the final exam and the specification portfolio.
Grades post to PowerSchool weekly. Tuesday covers the prior week’s daily work; Thursday covers the prior week’s classwork. Those posting days are the late-work deadlines — anything submitted through the standing form before the post counts in full, no email needed.
Grades come from evidence of your thinking, not the polish of the output. The full grading policy, absence rules, and grading scale live in the syllabus.
Materials
- Lab notebook — One can be provided by the teacher.
- Pencil or pen
- Chromebook — Provided by the teacher from the cart.
The teacher will obtain and provide materials needed for specific activities.
Syllabus
The full syllabus — course description, objectives, unit outline, grading, and classroom policies including the cell-phone and restroom rules — reads as a single document, formatted for print with an acknowledgment page to sign and return.