For the past three years I've run a Year 9 Digital Technologies course at St Andrew's Anglican College that takes students from designing for real people to shipping working iOS apps. I'm sharing the whole thing: unit plans, assessment, and the actual Canvas pages my students see.
The year runs in two halves. Semester 1 is design. Students start by redesigning our school's own Parent Portal app, which is live on the App Store and used by families every day. They interview a parent, record it on the Mac, and use AI to make sense of the transcript before proposing one focused improvement. Several of their ideas have made it into the production app. In the second project they design and build their own app concept with a natural-language workflow, moving from a written prompt to running SwiftUI in the Xcode Simulator.
Semester 2 is development. Students plan an app properly, then build and pitch it in Swift and Xcode.
The part I most want to share is how we use AI. It sits underneath the whole course as what Ken Kahn calls the learner's apprentice: it amplifies what a fifteen-year-old can imagine and reach, without doing the thinking for them. Students still run the interview, still decide what to build, still keep a log of every prompt and every fix. The class with the most AI turns out to be the most human, because the work that matters most is sitting across from a person and listening.
By June, students who had never written a line of Swift were demoing their own apps: a mood tracker that suggests music to match how you feel, a reading-streak tracker, a stock watcher, a phone that makes you exercise before it unlocks. Real, running apps.
What's in the pack:
- Unit plans for both semesters
- Assessment task sheets and marking guides
- The student-facing Canvas pages for both projects, from writing a good prompt to final submission
Take any of it and adapt it for your own class. Happy to answer questions in the replies.
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.