2018 App-making competition – competition blog space…

Blog 4:

Ursuline Secondary School:

BoomBoomLab (app blog #4)

Over the past week we finished our drawings. We got started creating our presentation. Eva changed the drawings from JPG to PNG files. Moira created our two minute video and submitted it. We have been brushing up on our presentation skills and are very excited to show them off with our finished app. We’ve had extra meetings during the week to get everything finished on time.

Blog 3:

Ursuline Secondary School:

BoomBoomLab (app blog #3)

We made a great deal of progress over the mid term. Firstly and most importantly we finished coding all the experiments on our app. We also added a back to the main menu button on each screen. We are really proud of our coding team and all the hard work they put in. The design team had a busy week too. They created beautiful, intricate images on pixarts- check them out on our Instagram page @boomboomlabs. We have uploaded some of the images to our app and they look incredible. Our marketing team had worked super hard analysing the data from our surveys and graphing questions 1-5.

Blog 2:

Ursuline Secondary School:

BoomBoomLab (app blog #2)

This week for our blog, we had managed to effectively prep ten slides of our presentation, giving each person a task to complete. Two of our members have also switched roles: Gloria is now head of marketing and Eva is joint head of coding with Kelli. We handed out our survey about our app as well this week. Our logo design team finally brought our logo to life and the final logo is now on our Instagram page. We put up a few photos from this past week to our Instagram page @boomboomlabs. Our coding team has successfully coded our protein experiment and is halfway through the glucose experiment.

Regina Mundi College

Since our last blog post ‘The Power of Language’ team have been working hard on our app. We have made many changes and improvements to our app. We have been meeting regularly before school in the mornings, at each other’s homes after school and we have also been working on the project during physics class. We ensure that no week goes by without making progress on the app. As a team we understand how short a time span the competition runs over and therefore we are all dedicated to making the most of the time we have and giving it our all for the few weeks.

Since our last blog post we have set up a twitter page. The twitter page is called @PowerofLanguag1 . This page is run by the members of the marketing team. We use the page to promote the app and create a bit of hype. We also use the app to keep people up to date on the progress of the app. We post pictures and uploads tweets of our progress. This keeps people informed and also engages them with the whole process. We believe that this sort of engagement with our target audience is important. We chose twitter as our social media platform as it is very popular among the age group (13-18) of our target audience.

We faced a problem the week before last as we were trying to work on our app in school but we weren’t able to load the mit app inventor 2 on the laptop with the school wifi. We discovered that the schools firewall blocked access to the website. This meant that we couldn’t work on the app in school which was a major problem for us. In an effort to overcome this problem we spoke to our teacher and he volunteered to email the school’s tech support man. He came to the school to look at the problem and spoke to our teacher about over-riding the system to allow us to use the app inventor website. While this problem was being solved we arranged many after school visits to each-others houses to work on the app. We were determined not to let this inconvenience derail our process and our motivation.

 We have also been working on adding sounds to our app. We decided that by adding sounds to our app it made the app more engaging, exciting and most importantly fun for our users. This process was new to us so we had to look up many tutorials online to figure it out. We met with many failed attempts but with persistence and perseverance we finally made a break through. We couldn’t have achieved this without teamwork, team co-operation and patience.

Since our last meeting we finalised our team name. We chose the name ‘The Power of Learning’. We settled on an English name as we have plans to branch out and expand on the app. While the app is currently only operational fro the learning of French we plan to expand the app in the future so it can teach other languages including but not limited to German and Irish. For this reason we felt a French name was inappropriate. The name is also a pun. The power in the title refers to the importance of learning but it also refers to power such a electricity and other energy. We plan to include energy awareness and conservation into our app. As our app is based around various rooms filed with common objects (intent on teaching practical language vocabulary), we plan to do so by having reminders in the various rooms/screens to turn off lights, close fridge doors, close windows and other environmentally friendly reminders (these reminders will be given in French).

Blog 1:

Ursuline Secondary School:

BoomBoomLab (app blog #1)

This week we began working on coding our app. Two members of our coding team worked together to encode our first experiment- the test for starch. Initially we had a bit of a problem creating a code that caused incorrect apparatus to explode, but we soon overcame this to create many mushroom cloudsJJ. The design team also got to work on creating our logo. Our marketing team created our instagram account. Follow us @boomboomlabs.

Scoil Mhuire Kanturk

 App – SumHoops

Team – Grace, Jogaile, Aine, Marcela, Jessica and Sarah.

These are our updates on the app development for the past two weeks.

Meeting held to discuss reply to proposal by mentor.

Organised the survey questions to send to primary school students and their parents.

We encountered problems with the time on the game so we changed the time to descending from ascending from zero.

We emailed the local primary schools notifying them about school surveys. We emailed Banteer, Kanturk (boys and girls schools), Newmarket and Scoil Mhuire Fatima (North Monastery Primary School) National schools.

We emailed our mentor Ayrton questions regarding the app.

We started looking at descriptions of apps and took down notes on what we thought were good ones to help us generate ideas for what our own description of app will be.

The splash screen was created in our app.

The screen with the play button is now working and began level screen with buttons for each level.

We encountered difficulties with how the splash screen will swap to play screen without the use of a button. We emailed our mentor about this hoping he will know.

Regina Mundi College

Since entering the competition we as a team have worked well together. We have brain-stormed together and are finally coming close to an idea for an app. While brain-storming we all called out ideas and in a constructive manner everyone offered opinions or enhancements to the suggested idea. This helped us to identify weaknesses in some ideas and improve others. As a result we have a solid plan for a language app. By brain-storming together we have done our best to eliminate any potential pitfalls in our app. We know that there will be challenges with our app as we progress but we are all on-hand and willing to work together as a team to iron out any problems we find.

We have put aside one hour before school on Monday mornings to work on the app. We took some time to choose a time that suits everyone and now believe that we have carefully selected a time that works for everyone as we are all committed to the early morning time slot. We have been given permission by our school to come in early and our teacher very kindly agreed to be there to help us if we need it.

Two girls on our team have very kindly volunteered their laptops for this project. They very selflessly agreed to transport their laptops on the bus to school on Monday mornings for the benefit of the team. Other girls on the team who weren’t allowed use their family laptops volunteered cases for the laptops to ensure the laptops stay safe.

All the girls who are working on building the app have downloaded the MIT inventor 2 app on their phones. We have looked up many tutorials online and have been trying out different ways of doing things such as using first person vs third person on the app. Then we in turn show the different versions to the whole group and we discuss the pros and cons of each way and come to a consensus. We work together to find out what works best for us and for the app.

Our project manager has been working hard on producing a business plan to present to the competition in the coming weeks. She updates us regularly and we all have an opportunity to contribute the business plan. We all ensure that she gets all the help that she needs and we are always encouraging her with the plan.

The girls on the marketing side of things are working on surveys to give to our target market (school kids). Their feedback will allow us to improve on our app to make it the best that it can be. On the marketing team we will show our feedback to the project manager and also to the girls working on the technology of the app and we will work with them to make changes and enhancements.

So while we are only at the early stages of our app we have established a very good team dynamic and are working very well together to maximise everyones talents and to build the best app we can.