NHS Students Creating Apps In Class

By Eliza Hallabeck

Thanks to a grant, Newtown High School teacher Kristin Violette is teaching a number of students how to create applications for Android phones, and all of the students are working on individual programs.

The “An App For That” course is funded by a Perkins Grant, and, Ms Violette explained, the course uses Massachusetts Institute of Technology-developed software called App Inventor. Ms Violette went to MIT over the summer to attend seminars for the course, and is working daily with the developers of the program to assess the curriculum.

“We’re on a Google group and we communicate daily,” said Ms Violette. Adding later, “I think we might be the only high school running this class as a full-year. Other people are using App Inventor as part of a course, like Farmington High School and Wethersfield High School. They have App Inventor as a unit, so it is great we are able to have it as the full year.”

An App For That, according to Ms Violette, is a capstone course available to juniors and seniors that helps them demonstrate their educational abilities.

“By the end they will design and develop an app in their field or career choice,” said Ms Violette.

Roughly a month-and-a-half into the school year the students have already completed creating a preliminary round of apps. Each student chose to design an app as part of learning how to use the software and become familiar with the process.

The course is also created as a college course, so Ms Violette said she is adopting the program for the high school level.

After the first apps were completed, students presented their creations to each other using a projector.

NHS senior Pat Cain said he is currently working on designing an app that will allow users to follow the statistics of up to four sports teams, senior Miles Gallatin said he is creating an app that tests a person’s reaction time using a button that changes color, junior Joe Calbo said he created a calendar app, senior Jay DeStories first created an app similar to the video game Pong and attempted to create physics simulation app, and senior Alex Strezeleki created a tile-matching game.

Joe Calbo said he thought of his calendar app because he wanted to create, “something that I would actually put on my phone.”

As part of the course Ms Violette said students are also creating a Google site with each of their apps on the page, with the idea that the sites and the apps will become public by the time the course is complete. The grant also covered the cost of purchasing Galaxy Nexus phones to test how the apps work.