Six days this semester begin with a problem you cannot solve neatly with what you already know, and one of them is the very first day of the course. That is deliberate. Every large idea in Grade 12 — objects, dictionaries, efficiency, sorting, version control, review — arrives because you needed it about fifteen minutes before anybody said its name. An idea you needed is an idea you keep.
This year the explorations are harder in one specific way. Last year the thing you were missing was usually a piece of syntax. This year it is usually a decision: which container, which algorithm, which version of the truth, which change to approve. Those have no lookup answer, and defending your choice is the assessed work.
| Exploration | The question, roughly |
|---|---|
| The Inherited Program | What does this do, and dare you change it? |
| The Wrong Container | Why did one deletion corrupt the whole tally? |
| The Race | Same answer, so why is one of them a thousand times slower? |
| Sorting by Hand | How many comparisons did that actually cost you? |
| The Merge Conflict | Two people, one line, both right — now what? |
| The Code Review | How do you say it so the code improves? |
You will read a program nobody in the room wrote, watch two parallel lists quietly stop agreeing, time two programs that give identical answers, sort twelve index cards under rules that make you count every look, break a file on purpose with somebody you like, and tell a teammate what is wrong with their work in a way they can use.
None of these pages ends with an answer, on purpose. The concept page always comes afterwards, because that is the order these ideas were invented in the first place — somebody was stuck, and the name came later.