Mobile Apps
Covid-19 Check-In Mobile App
When students started arriving back on my high school campus in the spring of 2021, the administration quickly realized they would need some sort of Covid-19 symptoms check-in system. I was asked if I could produce a mobile app that students could use on their phone.
Within 24 hours, I’d produced a simple app that had students answer a few questions and produced a green or red screen with a timestamp as they entered the campus. The school nurse adjusted the wording of a couple of the questions, and it was ready to go by the time students started to arrive!
The app was simple, but visually polished and appealing. I used the school’s mascot (a bulldog) and created a simple but elegant opening screen.
You can view the code here.
Mobile App Projects With Students
I taught the development of no-code/low-code apps to several classes, using the Thunkable platform. I created numerous projects of varying degrees of complexity, and produced tutorials for each.
Weather App
Students created a simple weather app using WeatherAPI to pull real-time weather information searchable by city or zip code. Simple JSON animations (from Lottie Animations) were added to correspond to different temperature bands. You can view the code here.
Speech Translator
Students created a simple translation app that used a combination of speech recognition from the microphone and a translation widget to translate spoken words into a language of the student’s choosing.
Simple To-Do List
Students created a simple to-do list using concepts they were already familiar with from other development environments, such as arrays and confirmation windows.
Video Tutorials
Though video tutorials aren’t something I normally do in an in-person classroom environment, many students benefitted from video tutorials and references during remote learning. This was especially true for the Thunkable platform, as it was completely new for students! Below is the introductory video for a simple drawing app, and the final installment in a series of videos in which I demonstrated how to build the weather app demonstrated above.