This fall, you will work as a software consultant for a small group of three or four clients at Lakefield District Public School (LDPS). Your clients are students in Grade 4 or Grade 5.
You will find out what your clients care about, design a small educational app around it, test your design with them, build the app in Swift and SwiftUI, and then hand it over in person.
The app you build is also your submission for the AP Computer Science Principles Create performance task.
Who you work with
You work on your own. Your clients are a small group of three or four LDPS students, and the app is for all of them.
The whole app is yours: your own design, your own private repository, your own code. Classmates still help you think, at the whiteboards and when you practise, but nobody else works on your app.
Three or four clients will not always agree. That is useful. Part of your job is to find what they share, to notice where they differ, and to design an app that works for each of them.
The four visits
We visit LDPS four times.
| Visit | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | Meet your clients. Find out what they love and what they find hard. |
| 2 | Your clients try your paper prototype. You watch and listen. |
| 3 | Your clients try a working version of your app. |
| 4 | You hand over the finished app. |
Each visit is short. What you do in the classes before a visit decides how useful that visit will be.
Keeping our clients safe
Your clients are nine or ten years old.
- First names only. In your notes, you may write a client’s first name. Never write a last name. Keep clients’ names out of your code, your commit messages, any AI chat, and anything you publish.
- No photos, no audio, no video of any child.
- Do not write down anything that could identify a client: family details, where they live, their teacher’s name, anything personal they happen to tell you. If they share something personal, listen kindly, do not write it down, and steer back to the app.
- Your app collects nothing. No accounts, no names typed in, no data sent anywhere. It works without the Internet.
- No contact with your clients outside the visits: no social media, no email, no messages.
- If a child says something that worries you, tell the LDPS teacher and me right away. Do not try to handle it yourself.