Step 1: Choose a Partner: Place students in pairs or groups of 3

Step 2: Brainstorm Problems: Prompt groups to spend several minutes silently brainstorming problems and recording them on their project guides. Circulate the room and remind them that at this point they shouldn't be thinking about an app they want to build or even whether it's possible to solve this problem with an app. Make sure they're beginning with the problem rather than the solution.

Step 3: Choose Your Problem: The project guide provides several criteria students can use to assess which of their problems they'd like to address. Ask students to look forward to Step 4 if they need more guidance on how they'll need to define or scope their problems. Give students a few minutes to discuss with their group and choose the problem they'd like to

Step 4: Define Your Problem: For this step students will need to appropriately scope their problem by defining who their audience is, what specifically is the problem, and how they will know they have fixed it.

Step 5: Your App: Once students have scoped their problem ask them to discuss an app that could be used to help solve their problem. To begin they'll just need to provide a high level description of the app that describes how a user would use it and what it does.

Step 6: Input, Output, Store, Process: In this step students design the way their app will actually work to process data.

First students will draw and then describe the outputs of their apps. On the left side they can make a rough sketch of what their app would look like. This does not need to be a final draft and is just there to help them brainstorm ideas and communicate to another group how their app would look. On the right side they have space to label what each individual piece of information on the screen.

Using the outputs that students selected as a guide, students should pick the inputs they'll need to create them. Only 6 spaces are provided though students could opt to choose more. This is somewhat intentional to help students scope the functionality of their app.

Students will describe the way their app processes data using as a model the way they would process it themselves. The goal here is primarily just to ensure students have selected inputs that could be processed to produce the outputs. For example, if they're finding a list of friends with birthday this month then both a computer and human would need to know a list of friends' birthdays and the current month.

Lastly students are asked to decide what information, if any, it makes sense to store long term.

Distribute: Apps and Problem Solving - Peer Review, one copy to each pair of students

Step 7: Peer Review: Each group should trade their project guides with another. They should fill out the first line of the peer review which asks what specific part of their project they'd like feedback on. Afterwards there are a number of directed questions as well as a chance to provide more open-ended feedback on the idea.

Students should be given their project guides back as well as their peer feedback. On the back there are questions where they can indicate what changes or improvements to their projects they intend to make on their apps based on the feedback.

Step 8: Finalize App and Make Poster: Students should incorporate the ideas of their peers in finalizing their app idea. They should then make a poster presenting their app following the guidance provided on the activity guide.