Creating apps: A non-IT Educator’s journey within a higher education landscape

Abstract

Our journey into mobile application (app) creation was instigated by the realisation that the learning of certain concepts and content could be significantly improved by technology-enhanced educational methods over traditional methods. A ubiquitous platform to place these educational tools are on mobile devices as apps. Our four phases of mobile app development were conceptualisation, content gathering, development and implementation and evaluation, which are extensively elaborated within this chapter. The main intention of this chapter is to provide non-information technology (non-IT), content expert educators with technical insights to create their own apps specific for the content they teach, in collaboration with computing trained educators, both within the context of a higher education institute. The two app examples discussed throughout this chapter are “SYM MO” (symmetry and molecular orbital theory) and “SM2 Chem” (Chinese-English translations of Chemistry terms), which were both developed by the authors. At present, “SM2 Chem” is the more popular app between the two, with an upward total count of 800 downloads per year; an acceptable number given the class size is approximately 100 per year. Apart from download counts, evaluation on the impact of this app was carried out with a pretest and an identical post-test at the start and end of the course, respectively. Students who used the app very frequently/frequently showed an improvement that was a significant threefold greater than those who used the app rarely/very rarely. Further evaluations are essential to prove that the learning of the concepts and content using the developed apps is indeed better than traditional methods.