Hi Carol. Our proposal specified 46 hours of PD per year. We are delivering that with a combination of summer PD, face-to-face afterschool PD, and video meetings.

Teachers who continued from the project’s first year to its second (our “Cohort 1”) are receiving differentiated PD from those who started in the second year (“Cohort 2”).

I definitely see PD as on-going process. Now that our Cohort 1 teachers have a full year of the project behind them, they are able to refine their practices in their second year.

They are able to advance their own CS knowledge and pedagogical skills, and share these insights with the newer Cohort 2 teacher group.

Our project plan is to institutionalize the curriculum primarily in the schools’ technology courses.

However, in our two districts, these are required middle school courses, so all students in the districts are receiving the project intervention.

I Love the Cowbell project Barbara! Gotta know – was that you or a student who came up with it?

Hi Barbara!

I am curious about your suggestion of having kids fill in only the programming. My colleague Akira suggested this and I didn’t want to do it. Would you elaborate on in what ways you found this effective?

I’m afraid that kids will feel less ownership over the project if they didn’t conceive of it and design it themselves. That’s a big part of the endeavor in our project — particularly during the summer camps, but also during the school-year.

I could see the programming-only work as a valuable exercise — situated in the context of kids doing their own original work.

I also feel it’s important for kids to exercise their digital literacy skills — e.g., selecting and editing image assets and/or sound assets, and learning how to upload them to App Inventor.

I do see this as a big part of the overall process of creating an app. It’s very important to me that kids feel like they’ve made something that’s their own.

Re: middle school vs. high school, this was based on our premise of infusing computer science into the districts’ existing, required, middle school technology courses.

We see great synergies between the existing courses’ educational goals, which include digital literacies, and the computer science material that the teachers are learning and introducing to their students.

Also, because the middle school technology courses are mandatory, we can be sure of reaching all students this way.

Fred, I understand your concern with the feeling of ownership idea. This certainly is important and helps drive a student to persist, but I guess I see this as all part of a process that comes out in stages.
In defense of the modular, partial app idea, that Barbara mentions, I see it as a way in a short 50 min time frame to get kids swiftly into the core concept of a given programming task quickly. So working with the teacher we have created a gallery of “starter” apps, where most of the interface, components, and some of the blocks are already revealed. We’ve created a couple similar starter apps around differing themes so that there is some measure of student choice involved.
Then once these concepts are introduced and mastered, the next phase is a new app based on the starter that has content more student driven and can have deep variations to the base code. So that in some cases we can cycle through a similar app with deeper computational thinking levels coming in successive iterations of what is almost the same activity!

I’m curious to see Barbara’s reply too :)

I agree with Fred that it is important to allow the students to customize their work or work on something they find interesting. If you look at our distance learning website projects at (http://ice-dl.cc.gatech.edu/?q=node/873) the projects always end with challenges, so the the student could add something else of their own choosing. We also tried to build in choice in some of the projects. For example the fortune teller allowed the students to specify the different fortunes. We also would have students work on anything they wanted after they had done enough projects that gave them a good start in understanding what they could create with App Inventor. One problem is that you need to manage expectations or kids think they are going to make Angry Birds in 30 minutes.

We found that middle school students got frustrated with the amount of work it takes to create a good user interface. We also found that they wouldn’t name things the same way we did and then couldn’t find the blocks for programming since it uses the widget name.

Akira is correct that the projects on our distance learning website were intended to scaffold the student so they could learn one particular thing in 30 minutes to an hour.

As for cowbell, yes I came up with that as a quick app to create that students found interesting. I also liked that you can change it to a clapping sound and say that it would be useful for a vet if they only had one arm and wanted to clap.

Thanks Ugochi!

We’re in our second year, and students who were 8th graders in our project last year will now be in 9th grade / high school, where some of them have options for taking a CS elective. We are doing a study on their choices, but we don’t have results yet.

Regarding App Inventor 2, it was important to us that kids make real apps that really work (see my note to Barbara Ericson above). To me, mobile apps have the greatest social currency as real products of computer science right now.

At the time that we launched the project, App Inventor 2 was the only tool for building apps that was appropriate for middle school kids.

I think code.org’s AppLab would be another possibility now.

Hi Nicole, thanks.
We’re starting to think about scaling — including formalizing our PD materials, and designing a tiered mentor/mentee model with teachers. Part of our approach is that teachers need to design the alignments between the CS curriculum and their existing curriculum (e.g. the tech literacy courses).
Our teachers have a variety of backgrounds, including business, engineering, and art.

Hi Harvey! We definitely see the Aha!’s during the school year and the summer camps. Actually this video is from the school year!

On technology, App Inventor can be a little frustrating but with good IT support it works well. We have figured out in the schools to use the WiFi connection between the tablets and the desktop computers. I definitely advise acquiring tablets — or donations of old phones, which work fine. But the emulator is really not fun to use.

Regarding debugging, the main thing we do is encourage everyone to use App Inventor’s “Live Development” mode — meaning, the tablet is always connected to the software IDE, so as soon as you add a component, you see it on the tablet’s screen.

Then we encourage kids to build and test their app iteratively.

Thanks, Fred, for the clarification and the advice on App Inventor!
Since the teachers have 15-20 hours of lessons, it seems the they need to get their students ready and able to create apps rather quickly. What resources did they find useful for getting started with App Inventor?

In our PD with our first cohort of teachers, we jointly developed the essential elements of the curriculum.

We use tutorials on the MIT site and Dave Wolber’s appinventor.org site.

Specifically, our first two apps are TalkToMe (from MIT) and I Have a Dream (from Wolber).

Those two apps are a good chunk of the school-year time, and the I Have a Dream app includes lots of digital literacy skills as well as App Inventor coding skills.

From there, teachers facilitate conversations where kids develop ideas for their own apps, and then carry them out.

Some of our teachers use additional tutorials. PaintPot is one of the more prevalent ones.