Sustainable App Success!

Room 11 have been working hard this term to design apps that promote sustainable living in our local community.

This term in Room 11, we have been learning about Sustainability.

Our aim for the term was to see if we could create small changes in people’s that would make it easier for them to become more aware of our environment and provide ways to help. We chose to stick to a local market to really connect with Dunedin and see if our ideas stuck. We have begun with our peers at Tahuna Intermediate School with over 300 students coming through our class to see our Apps in action.

We began this journey by looking at technology as a tool and seeing as most people have a mobile phone, we thought, what better way to create awareness than through a user friendly and powerful change making app.

We had a range of different activities to complete on google slides that helped us create our apps and see what problems we could try to help fix. We had to plan our app and choose what topic we wanted to research, some of us were interested in different energy sources, others were interested in reducing single use plastic in our community and others were interested in reducing plastic waste on our beaches.

Next we had to present a Shark Tank which is a bit like the show Dragons Den to pitch our App plans to Miss Pugh, a panel of judges and the rest of the class to see if they would invest in our ideas. We were marked on things like - whether we understood our target market, the depth of our idea and how we were going to market our app. We were then given the marking sheet to reflect on our ideas and make changes if needed to improve our apps.

We used Appmakr to program and display our apps, Wix to create our logos and icons, and Canva to create our backgrounds. We had to link all of our websites and videos from our coggle mind map onto our app. Finally we were ready to launch. Classes came to see all of the hard work that we put into the apps, and teachers and students downloaded some of them.

We hosted a launch party for the parents where they got to see all of the apps from our class and download them onto their phones.

Room 11 has created 12 apps and an awesome Rap video with original music and lyrics on Sustainability. The next step for us is to get as many people downloading and using our apps as possible. We hope that we can make our change in the world by giving people access to the information they need to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

If you would like to download and use our apps, there are posters all around the school with a barcode on them. Make sure to scan them with a QR scanner and save them to your home screen.

By Amelia Gray and Lucy Houston.