Guided Project / Session 3
Part 1: Question & Understand
After an icebreaker activity, hold a discussion about quiz apps. You can start by asking the following questions:
- Has anyone ever played a quiz app, whether on a phone or online?
- What's your favorite quiz app?
- What do you like about it?
Tell the students that they will be building a quiz app over the next four sessions. The first step to designing an application is to understand our audience. A great way to understand something is to formulate questions. During this project, we'll provide some questions for the students to use, while in the final creative project, students will be formulating their own questions.
Here are some questions to get started:
- Why do people enjoy playing quiz apps?
- What features might make someone want to play the quiz multiple times?
- Are some quiz subjects more fun and exciting than others?
- Is it possible to have too many or too few questions in a quiz?
- How does the look and feel of the app affect the user's experience?
Part 2: Ideate
Divide students into pairs (see Pairing Students ).
Each pair should think of a subject for their Quiz App, and a set of questions and answers for the quiz. Use the "Quiz App Planning Worksheet" to have them write at least 5 multiple-choice questions and 4 choices per question.
Next, tell students to log into App Lab and click the "Design" button. Have students experiment with dragging different elements out onto the screen. Mentors should also help students find the
Layout
section in the student guide, where they can learn more about design mode and laying out their interface. It's recommended that students keep this open in a new tab so that they can reference it when needed.
Part 3: Prototype
Give students the first set requirements for their quiz app (you can also write these on the board for easy reference).
- Show a start screen
- Show 5 or more questions (one question per screen), each with multiple choice answers
- Show the total number of correctly answered questions at the end
- On the last screen, have a "Play Again" button that allows the user to play the game again.
Mentors should then help students think about what elements they might use for their app. For example:
- What will your start screen look like?
- What do you need to use to get from one screen to the next?
- What element do you use to show the question text?
- What elements could you use to allow the user to select an answer?
Help students break down the problem into smaller tasks. For example, your first task might be the "start" screen and a button that switches the screen to the first question. Then, they can move on to making the first question work.
Remind the students that they don't have to do every piece at once. Get in the habit of clicking the "Run" button after making small changes just to see what happens. Sometimes we might lay out a screen in a certain way that seems to make sense until we actually try it from the user's perspective, and we see that other changes might be needed. The more often we test our changes the better.