A walk through Apps for Good's course resources

This blog offers a walk-through Apps for Good’s course resources, which help you teach computing with a real-world context. Apps for Good is an education technology charity that develops the computing skills of young people. Our free courses support you in guiding your students to develop a prototype app for a community they care about. Our resources are designed to engage students from all backgrounds and levels of attainment towards a brighter future through technology. You can choose from three courses: App for Social Action, Innovate for Climate Change or AI for Good.

If you’d like help choosing a course, why not book a 1:1 session with our Education Community Manager Kathy, who can help you easily transition over to the right course for your school: kathy.sheppard-barnes@appsforgood.org.

Each free Apps for Good course will help you guide your students to develop a prototype app that focuses on a community they care about. Once you have signed up to deliver a course, you’ll be able to access a folder that contains ALL of the resources you need to support your lessons.

The eWorkbook is a shared digital resource for you and your students. You can present it on your whiteboard as you guide your students using their own copy – working independently, in pairs or teams, to complete each section. There are also plenty of exploration activities to encourage student engagement and progression.

In the course folder, you will also find the Teacher eWorkbook Summary. This guide breaks down each session, showing you which activities are led by students or led by you, the teacher. The teacher-led activities are where you will introduce foundational concepts and instructions. However, the majority of activities are student-led and fast-paced which enables you to circulate the classroom and make sure that students keep to time.

Within the eWorkbook is the Youth Ideation Toolkit containing loads of fun and engaging, collaborative activities; helping your students to generate ideas for apps that focus on community action. We also provide a bespoke film for each course, embedded in the eWorkbook, featuring apps which relate to the course theme. As a taster, watch the film created for our App for Social Action course below, featuring some inspiring app entrepreneurs.

The README Course Overview document will provide you with support to get you and your classroom prepared to deliver the course, including:

• Advice on running lively and collaborative team activities
• Tips on how to make the most of the learning graph and assessment materials
• How to book an Industry Volunteer
• Guidance on effective teaching approaches for your computing lessons

The App Lab Login will introduce you to App Lab – the programming environment that pairs of students will use to design and program their app. Use this document as a guide on how to set up a code for each of your classes so you can access your students’ projects and manage their engagement with App Lab. Information on how to instruct your students to access App Lab is also contained in the guide.

The Learning Graph shows the learning journey throughout the course, with each session’s single learning objective and three session outcomes (one for each skill: essential skills; the course theme; and computing and digital literacy skills). You may find this information useful for creating Schemes of Work (SoW) and preparing internal assessments. You will need A3 paper if you wish to print this document.

The Keywords & Terms Posters support learners in literacy, numeracy and digital literacy with key vocabulary. The five types of posters offer keywords and subject-specific terms; course theme, computing; digital literacy; mobile phone hardware, software and features; as well as App Lab. We suggest you display the posters in the classroom before and during the course to strengthen learners' understanding and confidence in referencing subject-specific terms.

Print and display the School Promo Poster in advance of the course to promote it to students and share via your school’s parent portal and social media.

Via the eWorkbook, students are introduced to the Computing Self-Assessment sheet, using it as a visual reference to individually monitor their progression in computing during the development of their app. The sheet is available as a separate editable file in the resource folder, so that you can adapt the self-assessment to meet your schools’ end-of-course assessment requirements. At the end of the course, ask students to complete it by using RAG (Red, Amber, Green) and completing What Went Well (WWW) and Even Better If (EBI). Share it via your school’s online file/information sharing system for students to complete digitally, or print the self-assessment for the students. It is important that students become confident in the language of computing, which transcends the specifics of the App Lab programming environment.

The Summative Assessment is accessed via the Course Outline as a link (rather than sitting within the course folder). Your students complete this assessment at the end of the course, which is focused solely on computing, rather than assessing students’ understanding of the theme and App Lab.

The Student Certificate enables you to celebrate each student’s achievements at the end of the course. Either save a copy and paste in your e-signature or print and sign the certificates by hand.

Sign up now to access the full course resources and empower young people to create a better future with technology!

To help you prepare to deliver the course, Apps for Good offers two short online training videos – Introduction to Apps for Good Free Computing Courses and Teaching an Apps for Good Course - Introduction to App Lab.

Apps for Good is constantly striving to improve its courses. We always welcome feedback. Whether you have tips of your own to share, have spotted a mistake, want to let us know that you enjoyed the resources or would like to share any other thoughts, please email us at education@appsforgood.org.

With thanks to Dr Emma Posey, former Senior Learning Manager, Apps for Good (LinkedIn/X)