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!

We are making this our final call for testers! We have had a great response to our testing program and have gathered a wonderful group of families and teachers to help us test our apps before submission. We are looking for a few more people to sign up to help us with testing and then we will be closing testing for the time being. If this is something you are interested in participating in, this is your last chance!

Campfire Apps testers enjoy early access to our apps as they become available. All we ask is that you take some time to play the games and use our apps with your families or students and then answer a quick survey about your experience. You can participate in as many test cycles as you would like. And, perhaps the best part, is that you get our apps for FREE!

Currently, we are looking for testers with Apple devices (iPads, iPhone, iPod touch) and Kindle Fire devices.

If this sounds interesting to you, sign up below:

If you are a parent / family, please follow this link to sign up:
Family Testers

If you are a teacher, please follow this link to sign up:
Teacher Testers

If you are a Kindle Fire owner, please follow this link to sign up:
Kindle Fire Testers

We want to extend a huge thank you to those of you who have already responded to our call for testers and have been involved in helping us with this very important step of the development process! We would also like to thank any of you who may join our testing team this time around. Remember, this is your last chance.

As of February 14th, The APPlied Club at Patapsco High School has submitted their first app to Apple! The PHS Connect app is an app that the students in the club created for Patapsco. Within the app you can find out information about the school such as the calendar of events, links to the school’s social pages, and a direct link to the school’s Edline page. The club worked together in order to decide what features would be included in the app. They thought of the things that most students, parents, and faculty would look for, and went from there. It took them lots of work and effort, but the app is finally complete!

Within the app there are specific pages included such as a calendar of events, social links, a link to the school’s Edline, a news feed, an about page, and Patriot Pride which focuses on the recent achievements of the school.

Calendar

Social Links

Patriot Pride

To see the rest of the app you’ll have to wait until it’s released to the app store! We look forward to sharing it with all of you, let’s hope the app is approved on the first try!

The APPlied Club at Patapsco High School has been working very hard on finishing up their first app, and it’s almost complete! Shawn and Connor have been finishing the app’s final touches and getting it ready to be sent to Apple for approval. As a group, the club has been learning the guidelines and steps of pre-marketing. They’ve spent time brainstorming ideas of how they can market the app and get people excited and talking about it. Some of these ideas include making video trailers, posts on social networks, leaking sketches of the app, and word of mouth. They will be submitting the app to Apple for approval within the next few days and then they will begin the marketing process. We are looking forward to sharing the app with all of you! You can keep up with us at http://phs.appliedclub.org/ or here at the Campfire Apps blog.

Many parents believe that allowing technology in education won’t benefit their student and will only distract them. However, many teachers and educators disagree with that. Nowadays, you can’t even walk into a classroom without seeing some type of technology being used. The majority of teachers prefer to teach using tools such as laptops and PowerPoint programs because it mixes up the lesson and it’s something that will get students to comprehend the information better. Being a student myself, I can say that technology in the classroom is great. We all look forward to any chance we have of using the computers, and we enjoy not having to just copy down notes everyday. And different from many schools, my school even airs a daily video broadcast of our announcements every morning. I found a video on The Digital Generation Project that focuses on an elementary school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This elementary school is what they refer to as “wired.” They are very tech savvy and encourage technology use through all of their grades, kindergarten through 5th grade. This school is one of the many schools nationwide that are integrating even more technology into their education.

Apple has recently released a new app “iBooks2″ which is available for free through iTunes. It’s very similar to the original “iBooks” app, but the new version contains a section that is specifically geared towards students. Users will be able to see 3D images and rotate them for better understanding. Also, students can highlight and bookmark on the pages and create their own study cards within the app. There are a few reviews of the app in the Apple store and many people seem very excited about textbooks being available. One says that there is more detail included in these books than the paper versions. I think this app is a great idea! I haven’t used it yet, but it seems so helpful and I can’t wait to try it out. Once I get to college I’m sure that I’ll be using this app because I’d rather carry around an iPhone or an iPad instead of multiple 5 pound paper textbooks. If you want to learn more about this new app you can visit The Online Mom or The iBooks page in the App Store.

Campfire Apps is working on a new game and we’re looking for testers! All you have to do is fill out a quick survey and you’re set! If you’re a parent you can go to the Families page to get started. We are also looking for teachers to test. If you’re a teacher and you are interested in becoming a tester you can follow this link to the Teachers page. And lastly, we need Kindle Fire Users. You can find out all of the information you need by following the links given. We hope to hear from you soon!

While surfing the web, I came across this video and I thought I would share it with all of you. It shares information about  what “Global Kids, Inc.” is doing to teach students about world affairs. Global Kids is a non-profit organization for global learning and youth development. Groups of high school aged students are offered during school and after school programs to help teach them about things that are happening in the world that they don’t know much about. When asked if they wanted to learn more about global affairs, they were very excited because they never get to know about the different cultures of people that they go to school with. And they’ve never gotten the opportunity to learn this in school. They are using an online virtual world called “Second Life” to explore the world through the virtual side of things. They’re getting the chance to interact and learn more about people all over the world while sitting in their classrooms at school. To learn more about this project and what Global Kids is doing you can watch the video below.

The moment we have been working toward and waiting for has finally arrived! Our brand new app, Henry’s Smart Headlamp is now available for download in the iTunes App Store!

Henry’s Smart Headlamp is an iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch app created for preschoolers and young children to practice basic early learning skills. These skills include: capital and lowercase letter identification, number identification to 20, and shape and color identification. Use the game to review skills your child or student already knows or use it as a way to introduce one or more of these skills.

Game play features a unique seek-and-find interface where players use Henry’s headlamp to light up the night to find the hidden objects.

You can experience Henry’s Smart Headlamp from start to finish in this video:

We are so excited about our new app! It has been a big project for us and we have been waiting so patiently to be able to share it with you all! We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we have enjoyed creating it!

If you would like to know more about Henry’s Smart Headlamp, you can learn more on our Henry’s Smart Headlamp page.

To download the game now, visit the Henry’s Smart Headlamp page in iTunes.

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.