java programs to prove to my teacher that i know java well? AP computer science?

[Kaydell]

I think that you should be a good coder, following Java's coding conventions and producing good object-oriented code where the classes have a good separation of concerns.

It is part of the AP computer science curriculum to understand data-structeds, such as linked-lists, stacks, queues, trees, array, and algorithms such as sorting. You should be able to calculate big-O time order complexity such as O(n), O(log(n)), O(nlog(n)) etc given an algorithm you should be able to calculate the big-O for it.

It would be great if you knew a little about design patterns such as model-view-controller (MVC).

It would be great if you could create Java apps with good GUI using Swing.