University of Lethbridge Students Build Educational Apps for Kids
Learn how University of Lethbridge created a cross-disciplinary course for students to build educational apps for children.
Part of our #SpotlightSeries In Lightwell Education 🎒👩🏫 💻 🍏
With Lightwell’s background in children’s media (via The Adventures of Pan), University of Lethbridge’s (ULETH) educators approached Lightwell with an idea to create a new course about Creating Children’s Media. They were looking for a tool that made app creation and the handoff process easier for a team to collaborate with. The new course gave students an opportunity to work together in mini product pods, similar to app development in professional settings.
This cross-disciplinary approach consisted of New Media, Computing Science, Digital Audio Arts and Education majors working together to build an educational app for K-12 classroom. Professor Steed and Harper-Brown wanted their students to implement design thinking principles to build their app.
This course will involve brainstorming, designing instructional and technical aspects of the app, developing a prototype, and field testing with representatives of the target audience.
Both Professor Steed and Harper-Brown modeled the course to create a finished app in 12 classes. During the development process, the University partnered with local elementary schools for teams to conduct user experience and get feedback from their target audience — kids!
“Lightwell provided our students a user-friendly way of developing educational apps. This was a great tool because our students were not required to learn an involved programming language but were still successful in developing simple apps. It was a perfect match with our course. The University students took their apps out to 3 local elementary schools for field testing and the elementary students were quite engaged with those apps. It was interesting that a couple of the school teachers expressed interest in having their elementary students develop Lightwell apps.” — Professor Marlo Steed
For more information, Explore the course outline created by Professor Steed and Harper-Brown.
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