Adebimbola Ogunyale

Howard University Middle School is home to many young, bright scholars some of which hail from underserved communities. In conjunction with Clearly Innovative, NFTE and Verizon, I’ve had the opportunity to teach entrepreneurship and mobile development to a 7th and 8th grade class. Last year I was able to assist Patrick Gusman in the teaching of mobile development to some of the same 7th and 8th grade students. Mr. Gusman was able to enter a group of 8th grade students to the Verizon App Challenge. This is a challenge open to students from beginning in middle school up to high school. His group, “Build Central”, won the award for best in state last year.

Because of the nature of the challenge in alignment with both entrepreneurship, mobile development and STEM, it was an easy decision to have more groups enter the challenge. This year, I was able to submit 6 different app concepts from 6 different groups! All of the students were very excited from the moment they learned they had the opportunity to participate in the challenge. The students quickly learned they had the opportunity to each be entrepreneurs now with their mobile application ideas being their product and/or service.

During the creation of this project, students self selected groups of 4-7 students. Each of the groups were tasked with identifying a problem within their community that relates to either education, healthcare or sustainability. Before the brainstorming began, they each identified the roles within a startup to see which role they would be interested in. In each group, work was divided into 5 groups, wireframes, app logo, app concept overview, essay and video. Students took the lead on each of these micro-projects with the freedom to work on other parts of their app concept. The wireframes were developed using balsamiq mockups. App Logos were created using canva. Videos were created using both flip cameras and iMovie. Each of the groups identified a problem they each agreed on and did research, and took a possible idea of solution and created an app concept featuring each of these things.