More than 50 Arkansas students will showcase mobile apps they created in their computer science classes at the Arkansas Apps for Good Festival at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub on April 18. This is the fourth year the Apps for Good festival has been held in Arkansas.
The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub in North Little Rock. Students will give elevator pitches, hands-on demonstrations, presentations and will display posters and backboards for their projects. There will be an expo open to the public from noon to 1 p.m. and community members are encouraged to stop in and view the students’ work.
This festival is an opportunity for each of the teams to celebrate their work.
“By design, this is not a competition. It’s purely festive. We want them to be proud of their accomplishments for this year,” said Daniel Moix, director of Coding Arkansas’ Future, which organizes the event each year. Coding Arkansas’ Future is an initiative of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs that sets the standard in cross-training new computer science teachers and increasing the capacity of computer science education in Arkansas through a proven, scalable and repeatable process.
Over the past school year, students were charged to find a problem they want to solve and apply new skills to make a real-life app, exploring the full product development cycle from concept to coding to launch.
Apps for Good is a United Kingdom-based education technology charity working to power a generation to change their world with technology. The organization works alongside educators to develop a free, flexible course framework that infuses digital learning with teamwork, creativity and entrepreneurship.
ASMSA hosted the first Arkansas Apps for Good Festival in April 2016. Moix met Debbie Forster, co-CEO of Apps for Good, at a National Consortium of Secondary STEM Schools conference in November 2015. She spoke about her organization at the conference, and Moix met privately with her to discuss developing the program for Arkansas. It was a natural fit to include the schools participating in the Coding Arkansas’ Future program that year into the first Arkansas Apps for Good Festival.
Coding Arkansas’ Future’s methodology was developed by Moix, a state and nationally recognized innovator in the field of computer science. The philosophy leverages intensive training, mentorship and peer support to increase a teacher’s success in transitioning to teach computer science.
The initiative has proven that pedagogical mastery is an educator’s core skillset and that domain expertise can be taught and built. This revolutionary approach allows rapid adaptation and transformation of the education landscape in Arkansas to address the current and future needs of education in workforce development.
Follow Coding Arkansas’ Future on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter @codingARfuture. To learn more about Apps for Good, visit www.appsforgood.org.