“I learned a bit more about computers… that’s it really, just computering” – so said John, a student from Wick High School way up on the northern tip of Scotland, about Apps for Good. Apps for Good is a thirty hour programme designed for students in Key Stage 3 (in England and Wales) or S2-3 (in Scotland) and it teaches them, as John said, about “computering”, that is, how to design and build apps.
Debbie Forster, the UK Managing Director of Apps for Good, thinks that something in education is broken. As a former head teacher herself, she is all too aware of the system that encourages students to think only about exams. By contrast, Apps for Good is a way for students to do their own problem solving and to be innovative. As she said at an event at Glasgow University yesterday, one of the only rules of Apps for Good is that teachers must not give students a topic: “If you give them a theme, that’s great, but it’s not Apps for Good”.
Apps for Good is for all students and all teachers, says Debbie, from rural to urban, single sex or mixed. Wick High School, where John comes from, has been their surprise success story with four teams entered into the final competition in the last two years. One of their apps, Cattle Manager, is currently being downloaded 600 times a month and may be re-released as a paid-for version. The teacher there, Chris Aitken, says that 90% of the students who did Apps for Good went on to do Computer Science, including many girls.
What’s especially attractive about Apps for Good is the support for teachers through the website, where there are detailed lesson plans and CPD resources, and through Debbie’s crack team of over 700 experts worldwide. These experts from all areas of technology will do Skype sessions or even school visits to coach the teams as their apps start to develop. For Debbie, bringing the real world into the school like this is absolutely crucial. In addition, the final prize of taking an app to market is a great motivation for the students and good PR for any school.
Thirty teachers from around Scotland came to hear about Apps for Good yesterday, and Debbie is hoping that there will be fifty schools in Scotland this year, up from only three last year. Many schools are ready to take this leap because of the coding and games development that they already do – exciting stuff with the free Scratch software and other one-off events.
The event made me glad that Computer Science and ICT have moved on so much even in the last 10 years since I was doing them at school. I heard a lot of names of app developers that I hadn’t heard before – App-inventor, AppShed, Trigger.IO, AppMobi and so on. From the autumn, App for Good’s lesson plans will be available online and I’m sure I won’t be the only adult using them to start making an app or just catch up with coding – there’s no excuse to get left behind.
Follow Apps for Good @AppsforGoodCDI and Debbie @DebbieForster.
Jennifer Hilder 