Build your apps. Teach your students to build their apps.

Dublin, Ireland

11-16 July 2022

Carmen F Nevado and Pilar Carmona, have taken a course as part of a

KA 101: Teaching and Learning for Entrepreneurship.

We ran the course for teachers interested in learning how to build apps using an easy drag-and-drop visual programming tool that doesn't require them to write code; an opportunity to learn as well as to engage students in the amazing adventure of building software. We have learned by doing, we have become familiar with the App Inventor tool and we have designed our own app.

All this can have a positive impact on the motivation of students, who passively use apps and software without a clear understanding of their underlying logic and can help teachers to stimulate skills in their students such as creativity, entrepreneurship and develop an interest towards set school tasks.

By the end of the course, we have strengthened our communicative competence in English and acquired the basic skills needed to create an app, learning step by step about visual programming and how to use it in different school and teaching activities.

 Day 1

Welcome and presentation of participants. Monographic presentation.

What is an app. Purpose of creating it. Problems it helps to solve. Introduction to logic and basic programming language principles.

Afternoon guided tour of Dublin.

Day 2

MIT App Inventor. Interface. Types of platforms to design on. Tutorials, tools. Simulator. Designing an app (level 1): Image and Sound (e.g. cat meowing with a click).

Day 3

Designing an app, tutorial and practical activity (levels 2, 3 and 4): Movement and sound. Evaluation and problem solving.   

Day 4

Presentation of a sample app using MIT App Inventor. Evaluation of the tool, question session.

Putting into practice the knowledge acquired to design one's own app: Bird quiz (an app in English to classify birds). Tutorials.

Day 5

Presentation of each app designed by the participants. Feedback teacher-participants.

Mobincube, another app design (geolocator).

Micro.bit (Palm-sized circuit board with a series of 25 LEDs and a Bluetooth chip for wireless connection. Can be programmed to display letters, numbers and other symbols and characters): Music.

 Day 6

Course evaluation, feedback and discussion.

Awarding of certificates

Field trip to Galway and Moher

It has been a great intellectual experience, as well as linguistic immersion and, again, an opportunity to contact teachers from other parts of Europe for possible future mobilities.

 Possible app to design in our school, oriented to entrepreneurship:

- Survey on whether you have an entrepreneurial profile.

- Database of companies for student internships.

- Dictionary of specific terms