Introduction - Learning to Program for Adults

Have fun, create something useful, feel a sense of accomplishment, get excited again, write your very own program

Computer languages have come a long way. It is much easier nowadays to create your own apps and games and deploy them on phones and tablets. It is much different than you remember, if you took a programming class before in college.  It will be easier and faster than you think. You will write your first program in one hour or less. From then on, you will be on your way to writing many more programs to help you, entertain you and to use for home/school/work. 

You will be amazed at what you will accomplish in a short while. And the good news: no memorization, no homework and no assessments!!  

Goals:

To introduce adults to the joy of programming and creating useful and fun programs, apps and games. It will be project oriented and they will learn programming in the process. By June, they will have a number of completed apps/games/programs and a working knowledge of programming with an object oriented, event driven language. They will have the appreciation, satisfaction and knowledge of computers and their capabilities. 

You will learn to:

• Write many useful programs to help with your finances, shopping, around the house or in school/at work
• Write your own games to play. Be creative. Have fun.
• Deploy your apps and programs to cell phones and tablets. (Android or Apple). 
• Create programs that you can give to your friends and relatives no matter what computer they have (Windows, Mac or Linux)
• Write apps of your own design that you would find useful on your school/home computer, phone or tablet.  
• Learn how to write the apps that are on your phone now. See how it was done and have a try at your own personalized versions
• Write educational games, challenges, puzzles, etc for your sons, daughters, grandchildren or students.
• Write programs to help your students learn content that you taught in class and for them to use at home or on their phones. Use their own devices to help them learn the material and get better grades
• Analyze data - download data from the Internet (e.g. data from SchoolMax, GPS data from your phone/car, from your Fitbit, from Twitter, Facebook, weather data, etc ) and arrange and analyze it in many ways.
• Read/Write text, analyze text or other data from many sources (Word, Excel, etc) 

The commitment:

Initially, one hour to install the software, to learn the interface, basic terms and concepts and write your first program

Then as little as 30 minutes every week to learn new programming skills and how to create a new program.

You will have access to all future lessons, other lessons and examples to proceed at your own speed and on your own interests

Some examples of what you can create:

• Short but useful programs like a a tip calculator, currency converter, shopping app, your own weather app...
• See screenshots of examples here: Programs
• Programs to help manage your club, team, classroom, household, etc. - grading programs, seating charts, attendance, notes, scores, etc
• Your own original app to submit to the app store. (a number of students earn $300-500 a week with theirs).
• Classroom games with your own material/lessons for the students to use at home, on their phones.
• Action Games - make your content exciting, challenging, engaging in or out of class.
• Educational, fun games for your grandchildren to learn basics. Examples here
• Your own app with the sites and documents that you constantly access or need for reference. (Scott Horn's sites, bell schedules, teacher room assignments, etc). Have everything at your fingertips without having to search for in previous emails. Examples here
• Programs to help you at home. (Classroom grading programs, seating chart generators, shopping list manager, etc
• Your own Siri or Alexa. (aka Chatbots - artificial Intelligence) -  e.g. a classroom expert, one that only understands street talk, an Environmental expert that will answer any of your questions, a Spanish speaking Siri, etc (What can you come up with?)
• A BigData Program - learn to manipulate large amounts of data and analyze it. (download the names of everyone born the same year as you. Then arrange it to see exactly how popular your name was that year, how many people were given the same name and look at the creative derivations of your name. 

Some Sample Apps of What You Can Create:

           These look difficult but most involved 30-60 mins to learn the concepts and coding, 

            then a few hours to add graphics and the splash(intro) screens. 

           They were the result of 1week of classes per project

Educational - Older Students

Learn Japanese - Good learning app with advanced features. Learn Japanese language symbols  

Civics App - an app to help study Civics (chatbot, puzzle and various games)

EmpiroPedia - App of the most powerful empires in history 

Type It! - Excellent typing practice app with many levels from easy to difficult. Professionally done

Piano - Interactive piano game - learn the scales and chords

Math Practice App - nicely done video and an excellent app to practice your math.

Chemistry - Scroll to the very bottom of the page to see the screenshot of a chemistry app one student wrote

Educational - Younger Students

Game Page - a collection of challenges for young children on numbers, letters and colors

Learning Basic Spanish for Kids - Educational game - "Colors, Animals, Foods, Body Parts, Classroom Materials and Greetings"

Math Practice App - nicely done video and an excellent app to practice your math.

Useful Apps

Screenshots of many examples
Cancer App -  Helps determine correlations between individual genes and the effectiveness of cancer research results 

Schedule Generator - Records your study habits and helps make a schedule. Time Management App

Manager - A manager app that allows you to organize work, school, and/or lifestyle activities

Gallery+ - Create photo albums, tag photos and retrieve them

Games

Match My Order - Well done video. Fast-paced game, good graphics, good start with some difficult programming problems already solved

Bomb Defuse - Well done game to try to defuse the bombs before they go off

Memflash - A memory game to use to improve your memory