Mrs. Olstad, a CCI teacher at Sahuaro High School, assigned her students to make their own apps on an online coding website called Code.org. The students’ tasks were to code, design the survey app, and collect data from the votes.

“My students have come up with some fabulous projects,” said Mrs. Olstad proudly. Her favorite parts of this assignment every year are getting to see students’ creativity, things they like and enjoy, and getting to know them a little bit better before the end of the school year.

Beginner’s coding is usually taught by block code, which is easier to visualize for new learners. Block coding can be very difficult at first, but once you get a hang of it, it’s not that bad but students found themselves very frustrated with the lesson at first.

“The hardest part of making this app would have to be coding the whole thing. They give you a tutorial but you really have to just learn from your own experiences with the site and coding,” Destiny Lappitt and Suniya Witcher agree.

“It’s very frustrating because you have to make sure everything is in the right order and that nothing is wrong because if it is, the app won’t work the way you want it to,” Suniya said. Suniya herself doesn’t yet fully understand block coding but with every day, she’s catching on a little bit more, just like the rest of us.

Destiny Lappitt, one of Suniya Witcher’s group partners, found that the most frustrating part of making the app was figuring what to make the survey/app about. The hardest for her was also the coding, which is not that easy at first. But besides the frustrating part of it all, coding is overall fun to learn and is very satisfying to see something that you make be able to function.

“Our app is a survey about finding out people’s preferences like what kind of food they prefer, if they find themselves ‘sporty’, what kind of phones they prefer, just overall getting to know people who take the survey and find out the general consensus among our peers.” said Suniya and Destiny.