Give students a caesar cipher to reveal a picture or message in order to teach how characters can be treated as numbers and to reinforce string manipulation.
Analogize stacks and interrupts using a story in which a person is frequently interrupted in the course of performing everyday tasks.
Tie the importance of searching and sorting to internet search engines, then encourage students to create search mechanisms for data they want to analyze.
Teach ArrayLists for the AP CS A exam by having students uncover interesting information from your past students’ grades.
Have students reason about optimization by creating a program that’ll make an 80 minute playlist for a party.
To help students formalize their knowledge of data structures, act out these abstract ideas as a class.