ASMSA, LHJH students to showcase apps at festival
Students from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts and Lake Hamilton Junior High will be among more than 80 students to showcase their mobile applications during the Apps for Good Festival Friday in Little Rock.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson is scheduled to address the group and industry representatives will test student prototypes in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Engineering and Information Technology Auditorium. Participants will include students from Bryant High School, Cross County High School, Dardanelle High School, Greenwood High School, Pulaski County Special School District, Searcy High School and White County Central School.
Apps for Good is a United Kingdom-based education technology charity working to power a generation to change their world with technology. The organization works alongside educators to develop a free, flexible course framework that infuses digital learning with teamwork, creativity and entrepreneurship.
Students solve problems and apply new skills to make real-life apps and explore the full product development cycle from concept to coding to launch. They will deliver elevator pitches on Friday, hands-on demonstrations, presentations and will display posters and backboards for their projects.
Representatives from local technology companies such as Apptegy, First Orion/PrivacyStar and Metova, Inc. plan to attend.
“The skills that these young people are developing and demonstrating are exactly those that are increasingly in demand,” said Allison Nicholas, of First Orion.
Debbie Forster, Apps for Good Co. CEO, will join the festival from London via Skype, as will Robert Schukai, head of applied innovation at Thomson Reuters.
“We’d like to offer our congratulations to all of the student teams taking part in the Apps for Good Festival in Arkansas,” Forster said. “The students and their teachers have impressed us with their enthusiasm.
“At Apps for Good, we want to change technology education forever — to turn young tech consumers into tech creators and prepare them to tackle the 21st century workplace. Our course teaches not only digital skills, but also arms students with essential real-world skills such as teamwork, problem solving, confidence and resilience. We’re excited to see what the students have come up with and can’t wait to see Apps for Good grow in the U.S. Arkansas has offered us a great start to our work here.”
Instructors from most of these districts work in tandem with Daniel Moix, ASMSA’s computer science education specialist, to offer the Essentials of Computer Programming Plus course on-site at their respective schools this year. The course is offered through the Coding Arkansas’ Future teacher mentoring program. Participating faculty members will teach the course on their own in the future.
ASMSA has plans to partner with more than 30 districts next year to offer two new courses, Computer Science I and Computer Science II, using the same blended professional development approach. In addition, a pilot cohort will be testing out an Advanced Placement Computer Science A offering, giving students who want to continue their study of computer science a pathway forward.
“We want students to shift from being consumers of content and to become empowered as producers,” Moix said. “We want to go from thinking about what can I buy in the app store to what can I put in the app store.”
This festival is meant to be an opportunity for each of the teams to celebrate their work.
“By design, this is not a competition,” Moix said. “It’s purely festive. We want them to be proud of their accomplishments for this year.”
This is the second year Apps for Good has been held in Arkansas as a pilot program for the United States. Moix worked with Forster to introduce the program to a group of Arkansas schools resulting in the first U.S.-based Apps for Good festival last spring at ASMSA.
“Over the last five years, Apps for Good has grown in the U.K. from supporting a handful of schools and students to more than 1,100 educational institutions and more than 75,000 students in 2016,” Schukai said. “With this base firmly established, we are thrilled at Thomson Reuters to be partnering with Apps for Good as it starts to expand internationally.”