More than 60 middle school students from around central Iowa spent their week at Drake University learning to code and building mobile applications.
It’s not often a group of thirty middle schoolers is silent, especially on a warm summer day. But in the upper classrooms in Drake University‘s Carnegie Hall the only sounds heard are the clicking of keyboards and the occasional shuffling of chairs.
Erina, a seventh grader from Johnston, is building an Android game similar to Whac-a-Mole where players must catch the speedy vermin 50 times before being declared the winner. In the other room, West Des Moines eighth grader, Darrell, tinkers on two projects—an egg drop game and speaking app that repeats whatever the user says back to them.
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Both students agreed that they’d never had much experience building apps, but now, through Drake’s Summer App Camp, they were on their way to become pros.
The two week-long camps, which came to an end Thursday, are designed to be a computer science crash course for middle school students.
This is the third year Drake has hosted the summer app camp. In 2012, the camp was only held for one week and hosted just 12 students. Last year about 60 students attended over the course of the two weeks.
Assistant professor Tim Urness told SPN during the first week of the camp the students were learning quickly and that a number had already pushed their Android apps to the Google Play Store. The students used App Inventor, video tutorials and Samsung tablets purchased by the Iowa STEM Council for educational purposes like the App Camp.
Read about last year’s Drake App Camp through our previous coverage: “Des Moines middle schoolers learn app basics at Drake summer camp.”
Credits: App Camp photo from Twitter.
