App Prototyping with Early Learners: A Guided Journal

App Prototyping has always been a hugely popular project for my older elementary students. The collaboration, problem solving, brainstorming, prototyping - well, it's an activity that just checks all the boxes. This got me thinking, if these are the skills we want to foster in ALL of our learners, why not take the foundational concepts and scaffold it for early learners?

First step, to design a learning journal so my kiddos would have a place to store their work. Naturally, Pages was the perfect app for this.

To get started, learners were provided simple prompts.

From there, groups explored the app design process working through modules that focused on: Brainstorming, Planning, Prototyping and Evaluating. Using the various placeholders, (photo, video, drawing, text or even their voice) students could document their app design process from start to finish!

With so many steps and multiple class meetings over the course of the project, the journal became essential for project managing. As always, it was amazing to see the variations from journal to journal. With multi-modal options for sharing learning, students could really personalize the project and choose their favorite way to 'show what they know.'

I used this journal with students in grades K-2, but it could easily be adapted for older students too.

You can download a copy of the Pages journal here.

For more resources and ideas be sure to check out the Everyone Can Code resources in the Learning Center.