Apple showcases teacher app prototypes aimed at helping communities

Earlier this summer, Apple held five week-long Teacher Coding Academies in the U.S. to task educators with developing inventive app prototypes.

The Coding Academies were held in Austin, Boise, Nashville and Columbus and brought together educators from nearly 70 institutions. The programs were part of Apple’s Community Education Initiative, which aims to introduce coding opportunities to underrepresented communities across the U.S.

Now, the tech giant is showing off what teachers came up with.

At the start of each week of the Coding Academies, members of local organizations challenged teachers to design an app to meet a specific need. Apple specialists then worked with teachers to use Apple’s Swift and the Everyone Can Code curriculum to develop the required app. The weeks ended with teams presenting their work.

Some of the prototypes include:

• Austin — an app that lets parents of Ronald McDonald House patients communicate with their kids while they’re receiving care
• Boise — an app to help the police department connect with the city’s homeless population with open shelter beds and food banks
• Columbus — an app with which firefighters can log and monitor how long they were exposed to dangerous carcinogens while on the job

According to Apple’s blog post, several local community members were pleased with the prototypes and are looking into getting them developed into functioning apps. While these are only intended for use in U.S. communities, it’s interesting to see these ideas being floated around. With any luck, Canadian developers will follow suit with their own apps to help underrepresented communities.

More information on the apps can be found here.