The Near North District School Board (NNDSB) hosted a month-long summer co-op program allowing students to develop mobile apps with the help of tech professionals and like-minded students from around the province.
The program provided an “intensive” learning experience, the NNDSB explained in a recent release. The apps created are of the students’ own designs, and class members can also network with mentors from Apple Canada and the Canadian skills training company Our Wave Hub.
“Students work to identify a problem and code a mobile app to solve that problem,” the board explained, and they “work collaboratively across a variety of mobile platforms” while learning about “entrepreneurship and working in the tech industry.”
The program “is a great opportunity for students to really dive deeper into a potential career, helping them decide where their next move is towards obtaining the skills or education required to enter that career,” summer school principal Jamey Byers said.
See: Students down with STEM all summer long
NNDSB students Ty Hall and Patience Gilbank participated in the co-op and while there learned a new coding language called Swift. Before long, Hall created an exercise app that helps users target specific muscle groups. Gilbank created a productivity app, which helps high school students make schedules, manage their workload and prevent procrastination.
“Our cohort mentor worked at IBM, and she guided us through the steps and processes of developing anything,” Hall said. “She taught us how to focus our ideas into building an app, how to pitch our ideas and give feedback on everyone’s project.”
For Gilbank, the co-op not only inspired her creative side, but also solidified her decision to enter a career in technology. “I learned much more about design thinking during the co-op,” she said. “I also learned first-hand about what a future career for me might look like.”
“I would like to be a video game developer,” Gilbank said, “so enjoying working with code and user interfaces has solidified my future career choice.”
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.