The BCS Appathon Challenge at Greenwich
Cornelia Boldyreff, Yasmine Arafa, Asif Malik, Andy Wicks, Gillian Windall · Compass Journal of Learning and Teaching · 2016
The BCS Appathon set out to engage as many people as possible in the UK during one hour in programming an app for their mobile phones. Just over 50 people took part at Greenwich: students, staff, families and members of the general public. The Appathon's aim was to get participants to develop their own simple app during a one hour highly interactive workshop. The workshop continued on allowing Appathon attendees to work developing apps of their own design. In the concluding session, participants had an opportunity to present their apps in a “show and tell” activity.The success of the Appathon has encouraged staff in the department to think of how it could be employed with first year students who are active smart phone users but find programming difficult and lack confident when starting to learn programming. By putting first year students through the Appathon experience, we hope to create a large pool of student ambassadors who can work with us in taking the Appathon to local schools and using it as a taster event at our open days.