Teaching kids how their favorite apps are created

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (WAND) — Teaching kids new skills while encouraging them to express their creativity. College for Kids run by Parkland College hosted a series of classes over the summer break to allow kids to explore new interests while immersing themselves in courses that showed them what the colleges environment was like. This year one of the students' favorite classes was Incredible Apps.

During the course students were able to use easy to understand programs to create apps of their own. By learning the app creation process students were able to learn more about coding and what all goes into making their favorite games.

"Of course, they know what apps are and they have favorite apps," said David Black, a College for Kids Instructor, "but now they're in a position where they can sit on a computer and learn how to make their own apps."

The students were able to use their imagination to create games that they would want to play, but the course also brought students together to try out each other's creations.

"I had a kid create a dog petting app and he did it where when you click on the dog to pet it, it unlocks other dogs that you can pet. There where 10 dogs and the final dog you had to click 2500 times to unlock and there were two kids that were able to do that in the class and it was really popular."

Instructors of the course, say their biggest hope is that students walk away from the class with a newfound confidence and a passion to keep creating. Students were even hard at work after classes end for the day working on their creations at home, proud to show off their work to teachers and classmates the next day.

"I hope they're inspired. I hope that they realize they have some capabilities maybe that they didn't know about that they may think of computers in a way that helps them accomplish some goals."

Pushing kids to explore new topics and use their new skills to make their vision a reality, College for Kids is a long running program at Parkland College and organizers say more courses will be offered over the next summer break.