Building an APP with students: The joys and lessons

On January 23rd, 2013, the Avila College APP Group's APP, Lock Spin, went live on the App Store. A few days earlier, it had been available from Google Play. In this post, I reflect on some of the lessons I drew from this experience.
The idea behind Lock Spin was to help incoming year 7s learn how to use their combination locks. It also turned a familiar item at school into something we could have fun with.

Before I go any further, these are the links for downloading the APP:
App Store:     https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lock-spin/id594413665?ls=1&mt=8
Google Play:  http://goo.gl/2C9ZF

Five benefits of learning with a friend

Learning with a friend
Throughout this year, I have been undertaking small learning projects with my friend and colleague, Steven Francis. I find our learning sessions invigorating and a large part of what I like about my workplace. In this post, I share some advantages of learning with a friend.

(c) Can Stock Photo

Steven and I have established a weekly ritual that has turned Friday afternoon from a draining time of the week into an enjoyable one:

Every Friday after school, we pack up our our weekend corrections and head to a close-by eatery. We indulge in vegetarian pastries, soft drinks and some potato chips as we have a casual and, at times, cathartic chat (yes, men have those too!). After about 30 minutes, we head back to school and work on a learning project for about two hours. The common thread of our projects this year has been computer programming.

Three students at a teachers' conference

For the second year running, I had the privilege of taking three students to the VITTA annual conference to present a workshop on developing APPs using Corona SDK. This year, I took Ally from year 8, Yara from year 9 and Ping from year 11 (not their real names!). All three are members of the Avila College APP Group. 

Preparation

In my reflection on last year's experience, I wrote that 5 weeks would be needed to prepare the students. Unfortunately, this year's conference was at the start of week 4 of the school term. Starting at the end of the last semester would have been impractical as it would have clashed with exams and report-writing. Still, we met twice a week and the girls ran one of the APP Group meetings as a rehearsal.

Jessica's solution to a loopy problem

A well known algorithm, taught in Number Theory classes at tertiary level, is Euclid’s algorithm for finding the Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) of two numbers. In Australia, we tend to refer to the GCD as the Highest Common Factor. In this post, I describe the algorithm and present a year 8 student’s program that implements it.

The Algorithm

To illustrate what the GCD of two numbers is, let’s consider a 21 x 15 rectangle.

The first APP Group meeting of 2012

Today we had the first meeting for this year's APP Group. According to returned permission forms, the group should have 37 student members. The attendance today was 34. I was also joined by two of my colleagues, Steven and Colleen. The latter has been reading Seymour Papert lately and has learnt that Scratch was created by one of his students, Mitchell Resnick.

Why girls should learn computer programming

Lately, I have made a case for programming in the curriculum and my colleague, Sarah Macdonald, wrote about using Scratch to help students "understand their own problems, make mistakes and explore alternatives". This post is a manifesto for teaching girls in particular how to program. In it, I argue that this is an essential skill for girls to help make the future rather than see innovations as black magic which they may only consume.

Samantha (Year 9): "I have a friend who wrote a program that generates bibliographies for his school work."
Me: "That's great. How would you like to learn to write your own programs?"
Samantha: "No, Mr. Baroudi. That's what boys' schools are for!"

Picture from: canstockphoto.com

Beyond teaching programming: Scratch as a constructivist learning environment

This is a guest post is the second in a series (you can read the first post here) and is written by my colleague Sarah Macdonald. In it, Sarah tells about teaching Scratch for the first time to her year 7 girls.

Flashback, 2010

End of year curriculum planning meeting.  Students departed.  Reports written.  Teachers fatigued... and my Head of IT has just announced a major change in the IT curriculum for the following year.  We will be teaching Scratch.  What do I know about Scratch?  I know it’s about programming and primary schools are using it to create endless cartoons about a yellow cat.  Why Scratch?  I realise I have a lot to learn.