Students learn to build apps that use and process lists of information. The entire unit concludes with a three-day open-ended project in which students must build an app that makes a recommendation about any topic they wish. Each programming topic is covered in a specific sequence of lessons that ask students to ‘Explore’ ideas through hands-on activities, ‘Investigate’ these ideas through guided code reading, ‘Practice’ with sample problems, and apply their understanding as they ‘Make’ a one-day scoped project. Students expand the types of apps they can create as they learn how to store information (variables), make decisions (conditionals), and better organize code (functions). The unit concludes with students sharing the apps they develop with their classmates. Along the way, students learn practices like debugging, pair programming, and collecting and responding to feedback, which they will be able to use throughout the course as they build ever more complex projects.

Throughout the unit, they learn how to use ’s programming environment, App Lab, to design user interfaces and write simple event-driven programs.

Students work with partners to develop a simple app that teaches classmates about a topic of personal interest.

Students design their first app while learning both fundamental programming concepts and collaborative software development processes.

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