Thursday, December 8, 2011

App Development In The Classroom

Technology and the classroom, have come a long way. Now one school is offering a class on how to develop applications. You may think that I’m referring to a college course, although this is for high school students. There is a high school in Winchester, MA (Winchester High School) that is offering a class on Android app development. The name of the class is Designing Applications (Apps) for Android.

With Android being open sourced it has fewer design and publishing restrictions than Apple, therefore making it a more accessible tool for an educational course. Teacher Daniel Downs knows the future of technology is now and that future is in mobile devices, both in cellular phones and tablets.

Daniel Downs has created an educational curriculum that challenges the pupil in design, implementation, and the testing process of application development. Therefore enabling the student to have an immediate use of the app, Downs has chosen to use the software programs such as Adobe Flash CS5, Accelerometer, Java, Phone Gap and Google App Inventor Tools. These programs were chose because of their interactive educational value. 



These programs or tools are a part of hypermedia, as opposed to multimedia. Thus enabling a greater interactive learning process. Since the inception of this class, Designing Applications for Android, 32 original children’s applications have been designed and published, including Healthy Helper, The Adventures of Piggly Wiggly and Spooky Shapes to name a few.

Students are currently developing an app to replace the school’s paper agenda planners. Once finished, this app will enable each student to type their homework under digital touch-sensitive buttons that is connected to each teacher’s website. This is such a great accomplishment for these students and their teacher. We will see more schools follow their lead? What do you think?


1 comments:

This is really great accomplishment for these students and their teacher. Happy to hear this. Thank you for sharing this post. Feel free to visit us at Android App Development

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