Creating an app programming course for high schoolers

When I was a child, I loved to play with Legos. The best part was that after you had followed the instructions and built the model, then played with the model and got bored with it, you could take it apart and make something else. With each Lego set, the number of possible re-builds and new creations expanded with the number and style of pieces. You were limited by what you could build by the number and type of pieces you had in your collection, but each new set expanded upon the possibilities.

During the first semester of the app development class, I gave my students code examples that acted like Lego sets. First, students had to “build the set” by getting my code samples working. Then, they were encouraged to tweak the code to do something original. With each code sample, my students’ repertoire of “sets” grew. My hope was that they would have enough “pieces” to build an original app request—of course, they would be limited, but expecting a regular selection of high school students to master Objective-C from scratch, in one semester, was simply unrealistic.

By the second semester, I had dropped to 11 students. From those 11, I created two development teams, evenly distributing the strongest coders. Our staff submitted ideas, and the teams chose a client whose idea interested them. I knew that not every student was going to excel at coding, so during the second semester I incorporated business concepts, where the development teams acted like independent businesses. They had to do things like create a logo, a business name, business cards, a contract for their client, and a budget. Assignments such as these helped to engage the students who weren’t strong with the coding. Given the limitations of my coding knowledge, the students had to research and find their own answers independently, solve their own problems, and simply find a way to make things work. My optimism wasn’t high, but I thought that if I shot for the stars and caught the moon, then perhaps the effort would be worthwhile. I wasn’t disappointed.

On the very last day of class, both teams plugged my iPad into their Macs and placed their apps on my machine. They presented their work to their clients. They had done it! Both apps were buggy, and there’s no way these could have been submitted to the App Store, but the fact that these high school students, with very little help from me, were able to create two original apps was beyond my hopes and expectations. I was delightedly floored with their success. But that’s not the end. Two of my students independently created their own business and began to pursue careers in software development. My dream had been realized before my eyes.

A lot more has since happened—trips to Apple, creating my own iBook text with iBooks Author, training with Big Nerd Ranch, more iTunesU discoveries, hosting our own iPad conferences—and the second year of the course has been an improvement upon the first. At the 2013 Building Learning Communities conference, I look forward not only to talking about some of these experiences, but also to motivating teachers to explore the iOS environment with some guided activities, and then providing a framework for starting an iOS App Programming course.

During my session, I’ll talk about some of the best resources that I’ve come across, as well as some survival tips for instructors who simply don’t have the time to become master programmers themselves. Some of these tips will exemplify some popular trends in education, such as flipped learning, project-based learning, and authentic assessment. Though the session is not meant to be a discussion of instructional methodology, participants will find the material entirely relevant to the current trends being explored and discussed about today’s K-12 classroom. So, come with your Macs, come with Xcode, and come with open minds to dream with me about the possibilities of our future classrooms!

Thomas White is the iPad integration coordinator at Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, Calif. At the 2013 Building Learning Communities conference, hosted by November Learning in Boston, Mass., July 21-26, he will present a session about his experience creating a high school app development class. For more information about the conference and to register, go to http://novemberlearning.com/blc.

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