2016 Google CS4HS Shenzhen

Jul 14, 2016 karen's Blog

This is a guest blog by MIT App Inventor Master Trainer Xiangqun Chen.

My three-day CS4HS workshop was held in June. More than 40 teachers came to have the training. Most of them are novices on App Inventor.

Two weeks before the workshop, I began to recruit participants. Even though we don't offer credits for the training, a lot of teachers applied for the training. Many participants are core teachers of Shenzhen, and also included our discipline instructor and researcher for the Shenzhen Education Bureau.

I established an online course in advance. After recruiting, I let all participants enroll in the course so they can begin to study immediately.

On the first morning of training, a freshman of Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology showed how to control a drone with a mobile phone; the app was created with custom features of App Inventor that he developed by himself. Fantastic!

The next three days, I trained teachers on Computational Thinking, Setting Up App Inventor, How to open an App Inventor course in your own lab, Designer and Blocks Editor, Packaging and Sharing Apps, Lego and Arduino with App Inventor, including some interesting tutorials.

Teachers making their own apps.

Everyone was required to make a final project, and were allowed to collaborate with other teachers. On the last day, they presented their work : UI, Codes, Features, Improvement, Creative Ideas, all well done!

After the training, the teachers completed a survey about the workshop. The feedback is quite good. And they also gave me a lot of suggestions for improving the workshop. I'm so appreciative of that.

In the future, I would make a connection with Shenzhen Education Bureau and let more teachers take part in further training.