After just two weeks since we had attended the teacher-focused coding academy, it was time to put our newfound skills to use and host one of many district coding camps.
Our camp was held at Elsik Ninth Grade Center and was hosted by the four educators (myself included) tasked with bringing coding & app development to high school students. Our lesson was adapted from what we had taken part of during the coding academy.
Student Design Challenge
Objective
Students will create a functioning mobile app prototype using Apple Keynote to help solve a problem they believe affects their peers and their school.
Instruction
Students are first asked to identify a problem their school community faces. Then, students are divided into groups to share their problems. As a group, students will then decide which issue to focus on.
Once students have chosen which issue they would like to focus on, they will then be provided with paper to sketch design layouts for their apps (images, categories, buttons, details, etc).
After sketching ideas as a team, they are then introduced to basic how-to's of Apple Keynote (such as resizing their slide as well as adding links and media). When the overview of Keynote has been completed, students are then given a deadline and time to work within their groups to develop their prototype.
Once completed, students are then tasked with presenting their prototypes (either to just the class or guests). Students will have a total of five minutes to both give their presentation and give feedback from their audience. Once that is finished, audience members will alternate between groups until all groups have had an opportunity to present to all audience members in attendance.
Feedback
Formative assessments (such as regular check-ins after introducing new concepts and actively monitoring student progress) will be used primarily throughout this lession. A summative assessment (prototype presentation to audience) is used at the end of this assignment.
Aside from the lesson above (which was the major overarching achievement of the whole camp), there were additional smaller lessons that involved giving students an opportunity to tinker in Xcode and write a few lines of original code.
Although we were uncertain of what the expect, the camp turned out to be a success. Students were engaged and enjoyed the provided activities. Perhaps the best moment for everyone was seeing students present their app prototypes. It filled them with a sense of accomplishment and empowered them to believe that they, too, could be an app developer with just a bit of training.
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