What does the Apps for Good journey look like?

By teaching an Apps for Good course to your students, you'll be giving them the digital and essential skills they need thrive. You'll get ready-made resources and on-demand training, and it's really easy to get started! Here, we break down what the journey of signing up and teaching one of our courses looks like in a bit more detail.

Welcome to Apps for Good! First, get yourself signed up on our website. Once you are signed up, you will then be able to view and download all of our course content and materials, for free. It’s as easy as that! Let's get started...

It's time to pick the right theme for you and your students. We have three fantastic core courses to choose from, Innovate for Climate Change, App for Social Action and AI for Good. Our courses are mapped to the computing curriculums across the 4 UK nations and can be taught over 7-8 sessions. Our new eWorkbook format enables increased student independence too!

Innovate for Climate Change

We believe in preparing young people for the future, and one of the biggest issues facing them is climate change. A survey of teachers by climate education campaign group Teach the Future revealed that 9 out of 10 teachers in the UK also agree climate change education should be compulsory in schools, yet 7 out of 10 feel ill-equipped to teach it. Innovate for Climate Change teaches students about the 5 climate-action-focused UN Sustainable Development Goals, and includes our industry-inspired Youth Ideation Toolkit to support their ideation of a climate action app.

App for Social Action

App for Social Action empowers young people to take positive social action by creating an app with their peers. We present facts about social action and change carefully, and encourage young people to think critically about the issues that motivate them to help shape their future. During the course, students will design and create an app that is relevant to them and a community that they are familiar with. They will have access to our Youth Ideation Toolkit, which aims to support teams in developing their ideas in a fun and engaging way, using a range of creative and innovative approaches.

AI for Good

Our latest course, AI for Good, aims to empower young people to harness AI to do good in society by working with others to create a prototype app. Through our courses we encourage students to innovate, giving them the ideation tools to come up with original prototype app ideas. But we want young people to innovate responsibly and we recognise the emergent need for young people to develop their AI literacy – understanding AI so that they can make use of the opportunities, be mindful of the challenges and make well-informed choices about the use of AI.

Once you have chosen the course you would like to deliver, you can bookmark them to your account. This will allow you to quickly and easily return to them at a later date and ensure you are delivering the latest versions.

Don’t forget to book in a session with a real-world industry professional, to gain valuable feedback on your student’s app ideas! These sessions can be requested by a teacher at any time using a simple form through our online platform on our website. Your request will be sent to any of our Industry Volunteers who match the area of expertise you’ve requested, ensuring you get an experienced and inspiring professional who can provide the right type of feedback. Once this is taken care of, you will be prompted to set up a call with them. This helps to make sure your call takes place via a platform you feel comfortable using, and that the call takes place on a date and time to suit you.

All schools are invited to enter our annual Showcase, a celebration of our student teams from across the UK and all of their brilliant app ideas. The Apps for Good Showcase allows students to submit their app ideas, get written feedback and have the opportunity to pitch their idea to Industry Volunteers. Check out our Showcase page to find out more about entering, and see some of last year's entries!

Finally, we'd love your feedback! Hearing from schools, teachers and young people who have completed our courses is really valuable to us, and will help us to improve what we're doing and celebrate the great things that Apps for Good students are doing. We'd love to know about the impact Apps for Good has had on you, your students or your school as a whole - whether you think it's something big or small, we'd really love to hear from you.

Are you ready to start your Apps for Good journey? We are always on hand at education@appsforgood.org to answer any questions and to support you with course delivery, so please don’t hesitate to reach out!