Barrington High students in new coding class show off their creations

Students in Barrington High School's new mobile app development course got to show off their final projects Wednesday night, functioning iPhone and iPad apps, at an event called "Meet the Makers."

In all, 22 different apps were on display for people to view and interact with. There were apps that organized recipes, apps that predicted your blood type, several mobile games and more.

Tom Bredemeier, a computer science teacher who teaches many technology courses at the school, said he and his colleagues only got the idea to put on the event three weeks ago.

"We thought, 'These are turning out pretty good. We have to find a way to showcase this,'" Bredemeier said.

Although the apps were the students' final projects, many students said they were not done working on them.

Sophomores Kendall Phillips and Annalise Albright made an app called Simple Ensemble, which has interactive graphics of musical instruments that play a note when tapped. Phillips said neither had ever coded before the class.

"We learned that in coding, you start off with something simple that works, then you go on adding more to it," she said. "We are trying to do that with our app,"

Seniors Ryan Crowther, Sam Torrence and A J Priola made a proximity-based chat room app called Chain Link that automatically connects your device to others in a 50-foot radius using a Bluetooth connection. Priola said he got the idea from thinking about how sometimes there is no cellphone service at big events such as concerts, so people wouldn't be able to communicate using Facebook or Yik Yak.

Even though the app works - Torrence proved it by typing into the chat room while walking down the hallway - they said they will keep working on it until it is ready for the public.

"I want to be able to tell my friends, 'go check out my app in the app store,'" Priola said. "It is a portfolio builder, but we want the fame, fortune and glory too."

Barrington High School is among the first in the country to pilot a mobile app development course according to district officials. Its curriculum is adapted from an eight-week "iOS boot camp" for adults run by Chicago-based company Mobile Makers Academy. Bredemeier completed the boot camp himself before the school year started and said one important thing they wanted to bring to the high school was that coding requires constant learning.

"We teach you 60 percent of what you need to know and then you have to figure out the rest of the information that you need," Bredemeier said. "(Development) shops are looking for resourceful employees more than ones who know things off the top of their heads."

Don Bora from Mobile Makers Academy said he was very impressed by the apps that students had made.

"Our job as engineers is to keep learning," said Bora. "New tools can come out every six months. It is up to us to keep up."

The students coded with a programming language called Swift that was released by Apple in June 2014.

Representatives from Mobile Makers Academy were asked to rank the top five apps at the showcase, but in the end they didn't pick out winners, saying all of the apps were too good to choose between.