A group of Greenwood area students enjoyed a week-long hands-on introduction into how to build and program computer apps. The course was part of the annual Duke Energy Summer Institute hosted by Lander University.
The 12 middle school and high school students were led by Dr. Gilliean Lee, associate professor of computing at Lander.
Even with no prior experience, the students were successfully building apps from the first day of the course.
"For the course, we used App Inventor 2 that uses visual programming, which is ideal for beginners to build fully functional apps. Rather than typing lines of code, the students used a 'drag and drop' method that utilizes the same concepts," explained Lee.
Throughout the course, the students designed and built apps of their own, including ones that revolved around art, music, science and math, and games.
"The skill set, including computational thinking, developed by the students during the course should benefit them well, especially in their careers, as the future of computer use will continue to trend toward app-based," said Lee.
Results from a study carried out by Forbes magazine shows that the popularity of app use over traditional computing is already past the tipping point. For the first time, computing via apps (51 percent) significantly tops desktop computing (42 percent) among U.S. users.