The first day of training involved an intro to the AfG course and an insight into the technical training. Having already taught on the course this year (2011/12) my main objective was to top-up on App Inventor knowledge and to find out about changes / developments to programme; ready to teach it in September.
In case you don't know much about the course, here are a few things to start with...
We teach Apps For Good twice a week as an Enrichment class after school and in tutor time and we have three teams made up of twelve Year 8 students and one Year 9 student. Two of the three teams made it through to the final round of the AFGA - Apps for Good Awards - and we are off to the Barbican in London to attend the Awards Ceremony and hopefully win!!! For more info on the finalists and categories, visit http://appsforgood.org/blog/
AFG is...
● an award-winning problem-solving course
● student-led; an opportunity for young people to create imaginative mobile apps that
solve problems they care about
● a personalised learning experience
● is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK
License (Please share and share alike)
● a cross-curricular and multi-disciplinary programme
AFG is NOT...
● an app implementation or programming course, but is focused on problem solving and
developing entrepreneurial skills.
● an individual undertaking--it has a crucial teamwork and networking aspect
● based on traditional standardised assessment and a simple right or wrong answer; the
focus is on failing fast and often and emerging with a validated solution. We will provide
a spectrum of varying degrees of quality though
● a traditional “waterfall” or linear model of software development; it uses agile models and
is more like an iterative quest for the right problems, the right data, and of course, apt
solutions
AfG has 5 phases of progress, each with their own cycles of iteration:
● Problem Definition: Moving from big, vague out-of-scope ideas to precise problems
that can be solved
● Research: Validating hypotheses with customers and users
● Solution design: Exploring and describing and selecting from possible value-creating
solutions
● Product design: Describing how users will navigate in, and experience value, through
the solution
● First build pathway (in parallel with above steps): Moving toward a technical
implementation (using App Inventor) that solves some aspect of, or the crux of the
defined problem in the form of a prototype
Using group work, we were able to explore some of these steps. In our teams we came up with a problem, a persona and a product.
Our problem: We always lose socks and this results in lots of single socks!
Our persona: Busy married mum of two / likes to keep organised / tech savvy / can't keep on top of the housework
Our product: An app which allows users to fins other single socks in order to match a pair!
Our idea was a little tongue-in-cheek but we got to see how the students would go about 'creating' their app.
After an exciting start (the mention of the AFGA) and more than a few mentions of Wildern School (we are now classed as 'veterans'!) we were well into the session. Come lunchtime myself and Hayley were asked to be filmed as part of the AFGA film. We hadn't done our hair and makeup and didn't know what we were going to say but we were all smiles when it came to speaking about the school and the finals of the AFGA. The day was a success and we came away buzzing with ideas.
Roll on day two...
"...the focus is on failing fast and often and emerging with a validated solution"
ReplyDeleteMay I just point out, that the focus is really about not being scared about failing. Even if failing will most likely happen, it really doesn't have to. What stops students from trying is they are afraid of failing. So convincing them to not to be scared of failures is moving their progress forward. When they fail quickly trying and see that nothing bad happened from it, they are encouraged to adjust based on the feedback and keep trying more.