Our school district has a Pathways to Teaching program (P-TEACH). We partner with CU Denver so that our high school students and para professionals can earn college credit. This year, as part of a new STEM secondary pathway, we created three courses: STEM Methods, Digital Teaching and Learning (Digital Storytelling), and Makerspace Design Lab. All of these incorporate iPad use, elements of Everyone Can Create, and Swift coding with a focus on innovation. #StVrainPTEACH
As part of our Pathways to Teaching STEM Methods course, students used Swift coding to complete an About Me app to introduce themselves to a middle school math penpal. This project was an extension of a math autobiography activity I would do as a secondary math teacher during the first week of school each year, so I could get an understanding of each student's math identity.
About Me can be found in the app gallery in Swift Playground. It has four coded pages built into the template: home, story, favorites, and fun facts. On the home page, we had students change the title to include their name, choose a picture to represent themselves, customize the picture frame style, and personalize the color scheme. On the favorites page we welcomed students to customize as much as they wanted. They could leave the template categories of hobbies, foods, and guess my favorite colors and simply replace the prefilled emojis and color blocks with their personal favorites or they could change the categories in the code, too. On the fun facts page, they were asked to replace the existing fun fact texts with fun facts about them. They could customize even further by adding additional fun facts into the code. The key component of the project was the story page on which each student wrote their personal math story including their earliest memory, best memory, worst memory, most memorable teacher, and current feelings about math. Adding an image to their story was an optional customization.
To share their app, each student did a screencast adding audio of themselves explaining each page. In the future, we hope to find a better way to share apps created in Swift. If you know of any, please share in the comments section.
Sample About Me app pages:
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.