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Project Lead the Way Student-Designed Fitness App Builds Student Strengths

Grade 7 students in Krista Pachomski’s Project Lead The Way (PLTW) class, having practiced their real-world skills of invention, critical thinking, and problem-solving gained through the innovation of PLTW’s national STEM curriculum, have been using an App Inventor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to build a fitness app from scratch. A user can input the day of the week, the activity they performed, and the amount of time they took to perform it, and the app will calculate the total sum of active minutes for the week and the average amount of time spent on the week’s fitness activities. Each student's app includes three to five fitness activities with corresponding photos, videos, and directions on how to perform them. The students added a feature to the app that will choose an activity at random if the user is unsure of which activity they would like to perform. Mrs. Pachomsky said the neat thing about MIT App Inventor is that it generates a code to connect to an android device, so students are able to test out their app designs on a real phone!