Dr David McMeekin (co-Founder)

Spotlight on David today!!! Here's David in his WWDC tracksuit! We are seeing quite a bit of each other this month as we get ready for the third iteration of this course. What that involves is:

1. Updating the curriculum which has become ridiculously large now.
2. Liasing with education department staff (David is a great people person)
3. Making sure everyone is happy with the way we do this!!!

As the team involved with this needs to be fully coordinated and everybody needs to know where we stand from day one when the students arrive. The funny thing is with these classes and I may have mentioned this before, is that we have no behaviour management issues with them. We do low socio economic schools and their focus and diligence in the class is amazing, its lovely to watch. We also have a 1:1 ratio of male and female students in the development classes which is awesome.

Now back to David... I have not actually mentioned this but at the very beginning of this course I had a bit of a health issue. This saw me in Charlie Gardner hospital for 6 weeks in oncology. To be honest although I had a tube wired into me (felt like a cyborg!!!) 24 hours a day, keeping this course going and stepping it through the initiation phase became mandatory. I ended up walking from hospital without medical clearance to get back to this, well because I'm a bit stubborn like that!!! If you have seen "convos with my two year old" apparently that's not dissimilar to me! Anyway this is about David. We had floated the idea for this course in a taxi at the second last AUC conference in Melbourne. It was just an idea at this stage but little by little it became a reality. The admin of the course and curriculum were under me at this stage whist in hospital. Some of the mentor contracts became tricky to process. To make the admin more transparent the contracts were moved under David and his department at University.

David is a founder and a hero of this course. He makes sure the apps developed are native to the iOS platform ( we have had other requests) and we keep the course, development and coding based. Oh and he has three very brainy kids and a German wife who likes to go camping.

I have been asked recently about storyboards. They are not fundamental to this course although they are used. We consider them a design tool only and this is a development course. Our kids code!!!!!! And yes I threw a mega tantrum when I first saw them. Far to basic for our kids!

haha

how it works

I often get asked how this project works and to be honest, its a amazing mix of people that have a common value system of "raising digital literacy in children". It seems to have grown so much from David and my conversations of how Xcode is the most natural development environment for children and that they should all be learning it. I honestly believe that there was a vision to put this in high schools when it was adopted but I'll never meet Steve Jobs now so I'll never know. This may give you some idea of what we do: