Campfire Apps

The Campfire Apps team has been doing quite a lot recently! The most recent app we’ve released is the Caddy2Go - a miniature golf score keeping app, just in time for summertime family fun. Make sure to check that out! It’s free for a limited time!

The PHS APPlied Club came to a close at the end of the school year. We finished of the year with a launch party of our second app, Patriot Dash. The students were so excited that they were able to release two apps in a year’s time, however they were very upset for the year to end. They’re all looking forward to next year, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store!

Our summer began with a week long APPlied Club Summer Institute. We worked with 25 Baltimore County teachers to teach each of them how to start their own APPlied Club at their school. We hope that they will take all of this information back to their schools and do great things with it! To learn more, click here.

We hope that your summer is off to a great start! Keep an eye out for more posts from Campfire Apps coming soon!

This past Saturday Shawn, Stephanie, and I attended the “Insquared: Inclusive Innovation Unconference” at MICA in Baltimore. It was the first “unconference” that any of us had ever attended, and we had a great time! Each of us took away so much from the conference, and we’ve all been talking about it since we left!

We had the opportunity to listen and discuss multiple topics, including youth entrepreneurship and technology in the Baltimore area school systems. Shawn and Stephanie also presented their own session, “An Introduction to Mobile App Development.” They both did a great job presenting, and there were many people interested in the topic.

One of the best parts of the day was hearing from two great keynote speakers. In the morning we heard a talk from Tara Hunt about her own life experiences and how she has never given up to make it to where she is today. In the afternoon we heard from New York Times Bestseller, Baratunde Thurston, about his bestselling book, “How To Be Black“, and a general overview of his life and accomplishments. Both speakers were phenomenal and totally inspiring!

Overall, we were all able to learn a lot from this conference and we can’t wait to experience other conferences like this one!

ETA (from Stephanie): Shawn and I were very honored to be asked to present at this conference. It was an awesome event put on by the Greater Baltimore Tech Council (gbtc) and MICA. Perhaps the most rewarding element was seeing how many students attended the event. We had students from KIPP, Digital Harbor High, and our own Courtney and all of them were well-spoken, involved in the conversations, and inspiring. I know that it would have been difficult for me as a high school student to attend an event such as this and participate in the ways that the students did this past weekend.

We very much look forward to similar events in the future, as Courtney said, we had a great time and took away so many nuggets on knowledge, thought, and inspiration.

For anyone who is interested, Shawn posted the slides from our talk “An Intro to Mobile App Development” on his website, ShawnsBits.com. Please check them out, there are a TON of links to good resources and information contained in the presentation.

Are you signed up for the Campfire Apps Newsletter?! If not, you should be! Be the first to find out about new releases and other information! We send out a monthly newsletter to keep you up to date with what we’re doing. The monthly newsletter shares highlights from the blog and updates from what we’re working on. You can sign up to receive the newsletter here. We hope you’ll consider signing up to receive this bonus content from Campfire Apps!

Last weekend the Campfire Apps team attended Education Hack Day at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore. The event was a weekend-long hack-a-thon where teachers paired with developers in teams to produce products to match ideas teachers submitted for ways that technology could enhance their classrooms. The event was the first of its kind in Baltimore and was a great success.

It was wonderful to see so many people working hard together over the weekend to develop products that can be really useful to teachers and educators. There were a ton of great ideas that were pitched and at the end of the weekend there were 10 final products that were demonstrated.

We worked on our first app to be released for teachers, What’s Due?. This app is an assignment tracking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Teachers will be able to track assignments by student and sent alerts and reminders when assignments are due, plus much more. It is not complete just yet, but we hope to have it available for download next month.

We had a great time over the weekend working on the app. Our team consisted of Shawn and myself, my sister Jackie – who is pursuing a Master’s in Teaching in Social Studies, and our new intern Rahul. On Saturday, Jackie, Shawn, and I hashed out our idea and started deciding on features for the app. Jackie and I then started wireframing the app with paper and pencil. Shawn began storyboarding the app in the development program and worked on this until 4:30 Sunday morning! I worked on the artwork and interface elements last Saturday night. Then, Sunday afternoon Rahul joined us and helped Shawn with the programming in order to enable us to have a working demo for the presentations. Jackie joined us for a once over before the presentations began and then Shawn and I presented our demonstration to the audience.

Alas, we didn’t win, but we had an awesome time and it was such a great event, we were honored to be a part of it all. You can read more about the event on The Baltimore Sun’s website and the Education Hack Day’s website. You can see a few screenshots that we shared of the app What’s Due? on our Facebook page.

We are excited to share that, yet again, we are featured in the local press. This time we are featured in The Dundalk Eagle discussing our APPlied club at Patapsco High School and Center for the Arts. We are very honored to be featured in the paper and are very happy that this is a topic of interest about the school. We are lucky enough to be able to donate our time and effort to the school and give back to the community we are from through this club. We hope that the club will continue to generate interest and gain popularity with the students and staff. If you would like more information about what we are doing with the APPlied club, you can contact us at steph@campfireapps.com with your inquiries.

You can find the article online by following this link: Creativity Goes Mobile

A big thank you to reporter Nicole Rodman for the wonderful article and for taking the time to come visit the club and talk with the students.

We are so proud to be featured in The Baltimore Sun paper! We were interviewed by Gus Sentementes for his article “Mobile app economy inspires local entrepreneurs“. Campfire Apps was one of three local entrepreneurs featured in the article, and Gus did a wonderful job of highlighting exactly what it is we are aiming to do.

The article was published in Sunday’s paper, but if you missed it, you can read the full article on The Baltimore Sun’s website (for free). If you would like to see our photos that were included with the article you can do that right here. The first is a photo of us with our latest app Henry’s Spooky Headlamp (which is available in the app store RIGHT NOW!) and the second photo is of our app PosePad which is a photo session workflow guide for photographers and just got a total makeover and will be in the App Store with a new version quite soon. (The original version is available here). This app was put out under our former app development company Shawn’s Bits.

This is a big accomplishment for us. We are very proud to be born and raised in Baltimore and it is very important for us to be contributing members of the local community, this article acknowledges that. We are so excited to be a part of the mobile development community here in Baltimore and definitely want to share that excitement with others.

Thank you so much to Gus Sentementes for inviting us to be a part of this!