The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2023. - Magazine - Page 10
Courses
At Apps for Good, we offer a range of
innovative courses, all of which see
students develop a problem-solving
technology product, with opportunities
to bring in feedback from industry
experts and enter our annual Showcase.
and enable them to pitch to inspiring
industry experts.
We currently offer four stimulating
courses and two-day-long courses,
aimed at students from Year 6 /P7 to
Year 10/S4.
• App Development 10-12 sessions which can be delivered
to students in Y6-Y10 / P7 S4 with a basic
level of coding involved.
Our most popular courses are:
• App Development in a Day which allows students to create an
app in a day, aimed at Y6-Y10 students
with no programming required.
• Innovate for Climate Change 12 sessions aimed at Y8/S2 students
with a basic to advanced level of
coding.
We are currently developing a new
course, App for Social Action, that will
be launching in 2023 aimed at students
in Y7/S1.
Innovate for Climate Change our latest course
students’ thinking and refine their app
idea.
There’s no bigger challenge young
people will inherit than climate change
- a challenge which schools currently
feel ill-equipped to teach on their own.
While many young people lack the skills
they need to succeed in life, at Apps for
Good we bring together industry and
educators to engage young people, from
all backgrounds, in solving real world
challenges. That’s why we have
developed a new technology course ‘Innovate for Climate Change’, which
combines knowledge building with tech
innovation skills, focused on the climate
challenges young people care about.
Watch our Innovate for Climate Change
video and see the impact for yourselves: https://youtu.be/L1vMATkwncE
that our students work in, and blends
that with the notion of growing up to be
a citizen.”
Each summer, we celebrate the
amazing achievements of Apps for Good
students across the UK. We showcase
their innovative tech solutions to the
problems that matter to them most
This skills builder accredited course is
mapped to the U.K computing
curriculums, and has been developed
with Computational thinking, Digital
Literacy and essential skills in mind.
Over the course of 12 sessions, students
learn about concepts such as Systems
Thinking, CO2e and the Circular
Economy to apply this knowledge and
understanding when designing and
building their prototype app. During the
course, students can benefit from
feedback from industry experts who
volunteer their time to challenge
Last academic year, we had some
fantastic entries from students who had
taken part in the Innovate for Climate
Change course. You find out more about
the apps that the three finalists
developed here.
Our Impact
As a charity, we make it our business to
have a positive impact on young people.
We’re particularly interested in enabling
students to develop the essential skills
that equip them for future work. In
addition to developing computing skills,
82% of our students thought their teamwork improved, 75% said their confidence
had increased and 75% thought their
communication skills improved.
Daniel Conner, Head Teacher at Challney
High School for Boys told us, “I think
one of the great benefits of the Apps for
Good programme is the way it blends
together learning about the technology,
which is developing all the time and
is going to be required in most work
settings in the future for any settings
We inspire students about the
potential of tech and tech careers
through engaging our industry partners
in their app ideation, as Hannah Percival,
Assistant Principal at West Bromwich
Collegiate Academy observed, “It’s
opened up their eyes, (a lot of them),
to what Computer Science is, how they
could use that, whether they might then
think about that as a future career.”
Perhaps most important of all - we see
how young people are empowered by
solving problems they care about evident in our annual Showcase
celebrating student tech innovation,
which saw entries from 270 teams this
year. The value of a student driven
learning experience is summarised by
Paul Gallanagh from Dunoon, Principal
Teacher of Computer Science at Dunoon
Grammar School, “Our young people
simply won’t allow us to go back to
our former more passive pedagogy.
They love being able to fully immerse
themselves into deep and meaningful
learning experiences where they can
lead and make a real difference to their
communities.”
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