story by Claire Miller
Smartphone apps allow users to do a wide range of tasks – from checking their social media accounts and tracking their health data to learning new languages and creating videos.
But what if students went from being merely smartphone app users to developing the apps themselves?
Associate Professor Jonathan Cohen worked with Brendan Calandra, chair of the Department of Learning Sciences, and College of Education & Human Development alum Timothy Hicks (Ph.D. ’20) to study an after-school computing program for middle school students.
Their year-long study, supported by a National Science Foundation grant, was designed to give middle schoolers from underrepresented backgrounds the opportunity to learn about app development in a less formal educational setting.
“By working in that environment, we were able to meet students where they are and engage them in developing these skills in addition to the learning and development that happens during the school day,” Cohen explained. “And we wanted to work with this population because we believe that engaging students in these types of activities in middle school can prime the students to want to learn more about them in high school and beyond. The technological and critical problem-solving skills we helped them to develop are vital ones for them to develop at this stage in their lives.”
During the academic year, students spent two sessions a week in the after-school computing program, where they received an introduction to app development and learned how to use a program called App Inventor to design apps for mobile phones.
Participating students spent the first semester learning the basics and completing coding activities outlined in the after-school program’s curriculum. In the second semester, students could work in groups to develop their own apps that would solve a community problem.
Students had access to paper and digital guidelines for their projects and received direct instruction from session instructors, and the researchers found that students used these supports to different degrees. Most participants asked for instructors’ help to better understand the app development process at the beginning of the after-school program and generally needed less help over time; a few students asked for help when they wanted to work on projects that extended beyond the after-school program’s curriculum.
Cohen, Calandra and Hicks often observed students answering each other's questions, discussing new app ideas and showing their apps to friends. While their study didn’t conclusively prove that working with peers gave students a deeper understanding of app development, they did learn that 40 percent of students wanted to join the after-school computing program in the first semester because friends of theirs had joined.
Students who worked on their own projects during the second semester found ways to “remix” some of the apps they’d worked on in the first semester, from incorporating different backgrounds and images to adding new app features. They also created their own apps from scratch and tended to incorporate cultural elements from their personal lives, such as their favorite anime characters, into their designs.
“There is definitely value in having students follow instructions to create something, but we believe that the type of learning that can happen when students apply the knowledge and skills they developed to create a product of their own design results in richer and more durable learning and skill development,” Cohen explained. “Inevitably, when students try to build their own products (whether digital or physical), they will run into a situation where they need to analyze their own work critically, and perhaps engage in some creative problem-solving in the process of iterating on their work.”