Welcome! We are glad you are here!
Read the 61+ pages of blog entries to review the history of the program from the day the project was announced, each day of class, and as time progressed until a sister spawned project called XO Applab!
Feast your eyes and click through the navigation at the bottom of this page.
This summer’s Youth APPLab students release The Water Drops App for Android and the Water Drops website!
Check out and download the Water Drops App now!
Both the website and the app share the benefits of drinking water, while the app helps you keep track of the amount of water (cups) you drink with a daily and running total counters
Some of our students were sponsored by DC’s One City Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP2013).
Christina was voted VIP this summer. She worked on and finished 3 apps (one her very own #WordSearch – to be published on Google Play in just a few hours), was the first to finish her html docs for the summer project, and served as a great project manager. And to think, she said she wasn’t interested in technology when the summer started. #amazing #appMaker #programmer #girlPower
NOTE: Christina’s WordSearch app will be published on Google Play on August 16, 2013!
Youth APPLab participated in the 2013 National Day of Civic Hacking at Google, organized by Greg Bloom with several awesome sponsors. We worked on the Homework Helper Project, which is a google hangout-like web application that will allow students in DC to login and get tutoring assistance on-demand in any topic.
We completed a basic design and a very rough prototype of the flow of activities.
View images from our Facebook page:
Click here to view more photos (81 total)!
As the summer comes to a close, we reflect on some of the amazing accomplishments our students have achieved in our innovative subset of Youth APPLab!
For six weeks this past summer (June – August, 2012), a group of 8 teenage students formed an amazing team and became Uplift, Inc.’s inaugural class of XO APPLab!
XO APPLab set out to create an app (activity) for the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO laptop. Students and instructors worked together tirelessly during evening hours, Monday – Friday throughout the duration of the project. Programming, testing, and debugging occurred until the very last day = Demo Day! where students not only demonstrated Word It!, a vocabulary app for the XO – but a version for Android devices as well.
XO APPLab began with no one knowing the Python programming language – and some had never programmed at all before our first day. So, we broke into two teams: one to develop for the XO and the other to get introduced to programming Apps for Android Devices using App Inventor! Instructors did nothing but facilitate while students brainstormed, narrowed nine (9) original ideas down to one (1), designed functionality, and separated the large effort into smaller and easier programmable parts – all while learning Python and App Inventor for the first time.
The result?
History! XO APPLab students became the 1st all African-American development team under the age of 20 to develop an app for the XO laptop!
We are sincerely proud of their effort, hard work, creativity, and dedication to the project! You guys rock! …and so does our instructors!
We even documented several class days along with the final Demo Day on our Facebook page. Please head on over and check them out at your earliest convenience!
[fbalbum url=https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.466361353388484.114777.206578382700117&type=3 limit=20]
XO APPLab was graciously funded by the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation in Washington, DC. XO laptops were on loan from Sugar Lab DC. We are truly grateful for their investment in these future software developers.
A published paper about the project is due out soon, so please stay tuned for more.
Of course 6 weeks was not enough time to learn these programming languages, design an app, and build it in it’s entirety – so there are a few more modifications needed before we can publish. However, students did demo (a large portion of) each version on their intended devices. Check out the Demo Day pics for more details!
Questions? Requests for more information? Please feel free to contact us when you can.
Our Fall 2012 line-up of classes starts in just a week or so. We look forward to more amazing projects from our students.
Please stay tuned for more….
#TeamUplift
Uplift, Inc.
http://www.upliftdc.org