Lightwell at Avenues: The World School
Part of our #SpotlightSeries in Lightwell Education 🎒👩‍🏫 💻 🍎🗽🚕 Featuring an amazing class of 8th graders at Avenues collaborating to build “The Big App” about the Big Apple!
New York City is home to over 8 million people. Every single person who lives in NYC infuses their own unique cultural background into the city’s immersive melting pot. NYC neighborhoods transport you to experience a version of a home away from home. Residents pay homage to ancestors by selling a taste of their origins with Jamaican jerk chicken or Chinese roasted duck on every street corner.
This year, the 8th grade class of Avenues: The World School of New York studied different neighborhoods in New York City to inspire stronger connections to local communities and to deepen users’ understanding of the local issues, cultures, and stories. They navigated through alleyways to find artifacts, photographed street art, interviewed local business owners, and studied neighborhood demographics. This multi-disciplinary project involved Visual Arts, English, and World Course (History) where students created content for each class for a specific neighborhood. At the end of the project, Avenues School hosted an Exhibition Night where students presented their findings to family, friends, and guests.
Opportunity
Avenues School prides itself on being an innovator and leader in EduTech. They saw an opportunity to incorporate first-in-its-class technology while encouraging students to learn a new professional tool. Rather than a traditional presentation, Lightwell redefines how content can be delivered — in a way that is interactive, engaging and mobile. With Lightwell, students gain 21st century skills by creating an app to present user-driven content.
“I liked how students were able to easily create an interactive app with Lightwell“ — Yumi Nakanishi, Lead Technology Integrator
“The Big App,” the first app created by Avenues, incorporates all 80 individual student apps for each neighborhood.
The Project
Students explored different neighborhoods like Chinatown, Chelsea, Washington Heights, El Barrio, and Harlem. They spent time taking photographs, interpreting demographic data, and writing a vignette. They used Lightwell to transform their static content into rich media made for mobile.
Creativity around Rich Content and User-Centered Design
Over the course of two weeks, students created an app that combined work from Visual Arts, English, and World Course classes. They explored their creativity in Lightwell by making their vignettes and data visually stimulating and engaging for the user.
Whether it was hand-drawn artwork or a collage, students dynamically altered their images in Lightwell to captivate users with animations and interactions. That’s the power of exploring new mediums and new tools. Lightwell gives all students the ability to create user-driven content regardless of experience level.
“Each of the apps was unique and reflected each student’s personality“
As students designed their app, they were simultaneously testing their app creation on an iPad. They focused on user-centered design where they constantly challenged themselves to think of the user experience while navigating or interacting with their scene. Students reviewed each other’s work and provided feedback — strengthening their collaboration skills and overall teamwork.
The Big App
The Lightwell team worked with the Avenues team to compile all individual student apps into “The Big App.” The Avenues teaching and technology team exported apps Xcode, created an Apple Developer account and installed the student apps onto 25 iPads for Exhibition Night.
“I loved how Lightwell was able to assemble all the individual apps into a neighborhood app, and then combine the 5 neighborhoods into one Big App about NYC”
A quick breakdown of what was created: 80 student apps with 616 individual scenes including 2,955 image assets and 82 audio files. All of that interactive content built directly onto iPads is no easy feat! Since Lightwell automatically compiles each project into Xcode, the Avenues team installed each app with a simple click of a button. ▶️
At Exhibition Night, students proudly showcased their app creations for their family and friends to play with.
The Wrap Up
With two weeks of high impact work, Avenues’ entire 8th grade class published 80 individual apps, which was compiled into “The Big App.” Students gained experience with different facets of app development, and learned about the process of a new type of content creation. From prototyping to collaborating to design thinking within Lightwell, students developed foundational skills necessary for the 21st century.
“The Lightwell team went above and beyond to ensure the success of this project, thank you Lightwell team!”
👉 For a high-level presentation to share, please download here.
Read Avenues’ post: “The Big App: Here is New York.”
Want to learn more about Lightwell in the classroom? Feel free to send a note to Jerica@lightwell.pro.
