What to do next?

We continued to show tutorials to the students to ensure that they have a solid understanding of the different functions in App Inventor. We finished the following tutorials: Talking 8 Ball, Mole Mash and Space Invaders. A recommendation made to the students was to try and upgrade the tutorials if they didn't want to create their own game. This suggestion also saved a lot of time for planning, as last time I spent too much time on the drawing and didn't really leave enough time to plan.

Given that the App class took place after school, some students had difficulty concentrating and wanted to play games. Although this was a little frustrating at first, I soon realized the one thing that we have to understand is that the students we teach ARE PRIMARY students. Our teaching methods have to match the students we are teaching. Later on I learnt to incentivise the students by allowing them to have a break if they worked really hard for 30 minutes.

Another useful tip is to always have a teacher present in the room, especially they know the students well. In my case, the primary technology teacher knew the students well and was able to help keep the students on task. Although I was older than the primary school students, they sometimes were overcome with excitement and found it difficult to listen.

Also, it was helpful to play music in the background. At first, I let students listen to their own music, but that proved to make them less efficient as they would watch videos "without me knowing". Therefore, I took some of their recommendations for songs (no explicit songs allowed) and played the songs in the background. This allowed the students to have fun while concentrating a little better on their tasks.

Overall, these couple of weeks have been a lot more productive than I thought and I hope to continually make improvements in these classes!