Fall 2017 Newsletter
How did they do that? When the middle schoolers on campus got ready to present the smartphone games they had invented to their parents, Vidhyashree Nagaraju was not sure what to expect.
Nagaraju said she believes that the presentation motivated the children: “They take it as a challenge… they want to show that they are really good.”
“We were just guessing that they would come up with some simple games,” (similar to the popular application Candy Crush), said Nagaraju, one of the instructors at the week-long summer camp.
And parents were impressed:
But instead, the 21 middle-school aged participants developed complex mobile application games that left the instructors wondering, “How did they do it?” Nagaraju said. This is the first year that the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth hosted a mobile application summer camp for middle schoolers from the New Bedford, Fall River and Dartmouth public schools.
“We could not believe that UMass [Dartmouth] was doing something like this,” said Dr. Shakhnoza Kayumova, whose son and daughter participated in the summer camp. In the past, she would have had to take them to Boston to access similar opportunities, she said. Eleven-year-old Sayid Achilov, Dr. Kayumova’s son, created an application called the “Magic Eight Ball,” similar to the popular toy. His application allowed people to ask a question, physically shake their phone or tablet, and an answer would appear.
At summer camp, the students were introduced to different games and told how they worked. They learned about logic and how to use variables. Early on, they were told that to receive a certificate of completion, they would have to create their own Android applications and present them to their parents.
She also pointed out that middle school is an important age to introduce girls to computer science. Young women go through many emotional and physical changes at that age, and are sometimes peer-pressured into particular fields, such as art or law, Nagaraju said. “When you can give them an opportunity to prove to themselves that they are good in programing or some computing education… they will think about not letting society define what they should do,” she said.
Nagaraju, a Ph.D. student who researches software reliability and the President of the Society of Women Engineers at UMass Dartmouth, grew up in a rural part of India. She volunteered at orphanages where she met young girls with limited schooling.
The children used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s App Inventor that makes it easy for people of all ages to create mobile applications, according to its website.
“The kids will come up with great questions like “how is it working?” and that is where we enter into the picture, and we give them descriptions of the underlying programming,” she said.
“An introduction, demo, hands-on activities, and allowing them to develop their own apps gives them confidence to learn the rest on their own, or at least to consider that as an option in future academics,” she said.
But her desire to help people access a solid education is rooted well beyond campus.
“The main objective of this program is to bring some interest in young children toward computing or computing education,” (such as programing), said Nagaraju, one of several camp instructors.
The App Inventor allows people to drag and drop colorful modules that emulate a function in the mobile application they are building, rather than tediously writing out hundreds of lines of code, Nagaraju said. That makes the learning fun, because students get an immediate result, she added.
Asked why she believed it was important to run such camps, Nagaraju replied that it is UMass Dartmouth’s responsibility to help local school children explore possible career opportunities.
His sister, Feyza Achilova, 13, an avid reader, realized that not everyone enjoys reading books, but many people spend time reading text messages on their phone. She created an application that turned a book into the format of text messages. Dr. Kayumova, an Assistant Professor at UMass Dartmouth focused on STEM education and teacher development, appreciated that the children at summer camp could develop their own applications, rather than fulfilling a “cookie-cutter” activity. “It was amazing,” she said of her two children who attend Dartmouth Middle School. “They utilized the knowledge they learned [at camp], but they made the knowledge theirs.”
“It used to bug me that… if there is somebody who can teach them for free, maybe they will learn a lot of things because they [have] such a high potential,” she said. “They have their dreams.” Due to its success, the university has planned to also host the Android mobile application workshop next summer. They also want to host a second one, where children will develop IOS based mobile applications, which would be compatible with IPhones. It turns out, the children were not the only ones who enjoyed camp this year. “It was fun!” Nagaraju said, adding “It was awesome to just spend a week with them.”. n
coe@umassd.edu • College of Engineering • www.umassd.edu/engineering
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