Pam Ford
I have taught at Lovejoy high school since 2008. I have 3 sons that graduated from Lovejoy High School: Matt, Chris and Ryan.
BK (before kids) I attended Tarleton State University where I graduated with a BS in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science. Upon graduation I was hired as a programmer for Raytheon and worked as an adjunct professor for Collin College where I taught C/C++ and Unix OS. I worked at Raytheon as a programmer for 5 years.
I have been a "Reader" (ie. Grader of AP exams) for the College Board Computer Science exam since 2014.
I teach/coach/lead the Computer Science team and the Cyber Security team. We participate in many (>10) programming contests for the CS team throughout the school year and we have won district in Computer Science since 2012 (at least. . .that's when I began teaching CS). For the Cyber Security team we compete in the national Cyber Patriots competition each year.
I teach three levels of computer science at LHS. The Adv CS 1 class introduces students gradually, and hopefully in a fun way, programming concepts such as variables, loops, if statements, and boolean operators as well as a gentle introduction to Objects using Karel the robot. The AP Computer Science A class prepares students to take the AP CSA exam in May; we repeat the topics of Adv CS quickly, expanding their knowledge of Java (so we go deeper and further :-); we then cover arrays, lists, and inheritance of Objects. In Advanced Programming 3 we continue in Java, preparing students to take the OCA Java Associate Certification exam from Oracle (they currently can sign up on their own to take the test). During the second semester of Advanced Programming 3 we move to operating systems learning DOS and Unix basic commands and some scripting. The last part of the year we spend on relational databases, learning SQL and writing servlets in Java.
