Final App Ideas

When we return to school in the classroom, we must start working in earnest on the final apps for this class. Here are a few things you can expect.

• You will have only about four weeks to finish the final app.
• The app must be ready to submit to the Apple App Store.
• You must complete this project in order to get college credit for this course (it is part of your final exam).
• You will mostly be working in pairs.
• I will usually try to have a struggling student work with another student who is doing better.
• I will usually pair you with another student who is not sitting near you.
• I will usually try to pair students with complementary skills: for example, a good designer gets paired with a good coder. This is the way companies usually work.
• I will give you a grade on your final project based on the proportion of your contribution. For example, if one person does 2/3 of the work and the other person does only 1/3 of the work, the student who did more work will get an A, but the student who did less work will get only a C, which is not enough to get college credit for the course. So plan to put forth your best effort as part of a team. This is also the way real companies work.

The very first step toward your final app is to decide what the app will be. You will need to give me three app ideas: your first, second, and third choices. This will better allow me to pair you up with someone who has similar interests. Here are some guidelines:

• Your app should be something that makes the world a better place. (Albeit possibly in a small way.)
• I do not allow any games except educational games for children, which I encourage.
• The world does not need any more video or music players.
• We are not equipped to make collaborative apps that communicate between phones or between a phone and a server. This kind of programming is beyond what we learn in this class. (You can read about it in Unit 5.)
• The two biggest-selling app store categories are: 
• educational programs, and
• health and fitness.
• Think about the projects we did at the beginning of the school year. Could you write an app that tackles one of our pervasive problems such as:
• homelessness
• human trafficking
• bullying
• gun violence
• drug use
• Think about projects that might help students in another class here or at your home school. Examples of some projects that students have done in the past:
• Resistor Color Code (beefed up) with tutorial mode
• HVAC symbol dictionary with tutorial mode
• Welding symbol dictionary with tutorial mode
• Metric conversion for use in culinary and/or medical, with tutorial mode
• Anatomy app 
• Sign language app to help hearing students communicate with deaf friends
• Other examples:
• Are you a musician? Could you make a music dictionary? A music symbol dictionary? 
•  Chemistry app?
• Trigonometry app?
• Children's educational apps:
• Help children learn colors, numbers, shapes
• Translate the colors into different languages (e.g.Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Japanese)
• Add audio

Write up your app ideas in Google Docs. For each idea, I need to know the following information. You can use bullet points. I'm mostly interested in a summary, not a long discussion.

• What does your app do?
• How does your app make the world a better place?
• What is the target audience (briefly)
• How many screens do you think you'll need? 
• What kind of navigation might it use? (tab bars vs. navigation controller vs. other kind of navigation)
•  How many graphics might you need to make using Adobe Illustrator? (Example: welding dictionary has at least 50 different symbols. HVAC dictionary has about 50 symbols.)
• How many sound files might you need? (example: 10 colors x 5 languages = 50 audio files)
• What new thing might you need to learn in order to make this app possible? (This lets me know what I might teach next.)

Share your three app ideas with me at mbrautigam@metroed.net. If you prefer to do this using Microsoft Word, send me the file in email as an email attachment. This counts under the academic category of assignments, so it is worth a few % of your grade.