Newtown Middle School students Madison Hintze, Gina Lewis, and Taegan Smith participated in the Connecticut Educators Computer Association (CECA)'s 19th Annual Technology Exposition on April 27.

The girls, all seventh graders, attended the exposition with NMS computer integration teacher Rachel Smith to share their design for an app they called, "Pizza Oven."

"We got to show people our app," said Madison on Friday, April 29.

Taegan said the girls also spent time seeing what other students had created and had on display at the exposition.

The three students explained Ms Smith applied to attend the exposition, and shared the news with them about the application. While the girls were still waiting to learn whether they would be attending the exposition, they said they "fooled around" with designing other apps for fun. When Ms Smith learned her application to attend the exposition had been accepted, the girls said they decided to make an app "for real."

Ms Smith said her students came in during lunches and spent extra time working on the app to make it ready for the exposition.

Over roughly a month-and-a-half the girls created Pizza Oven, which asks users to tap the screen with their finger or curser to move "toppings" onto a pizza. Users are timed for how long it takes them to make each pizza.

The girls said they used the computer program Bitsbox to create their app, and Ms Smith said Bitsbox is the program used in the seventh grade computer integration curriculum.

"What I like about it, is that it is fun," said Ms Smith, adding the program also allows students to be creative.

Bitsbox, Ms Smith said, teaches students the basics of coding and the students can then apply the basics to their projects.

For the Pizza Oven app, Madison said the girls had to come up with their own code to make the app do what they wanted it to do.

Madison said she thinks it would be "cool" if the girls developed Pizza Oven further, and Taegan said an idea of working with a pizza company to produce the pizzas created in the app was an idea the girls heard at the expo.

Each of the girls said seeing the other students and projects at the expo was helpful and fun.