Teaching app design to kids with Future Legends

Leonie Pfalz
3 min readSep 9, 2019

This past weekend saw the third edition of the Future Legends ‘Design a mobile app’ workshop at Novoda, Berlin. We welcomed 7–9 year-old designers and innovators to learn the basics of user experience design.

The children learned the power of discovery interviews, explored app ideas and designed their very own apps to help their partners to have fun at the zoo!

1. Discovery interviews

Working in pairs, the children interviewed each other about their next trip to the zoo asking the following 4 questions.

  1. What do you like about visiting the zoo?
  2. How would you like to travel?
  3. Who would you like to go with?
  4. What would you like to do at the zoo?

2. Defining the app idea

After completing the interview, the children were asked to mark the things where they thought an app might be able to help before finishing the following sentence:

’I want to design an app to help my partner to…’.

Each phase started with a demonstration so they could experience the task as a group before giving it a go themselves.

3. App design

After learning the basics of navigation and interaction, they started to design their apps! Between all of the innovators, they helped their partners to buy tickets, navigate to the zoo, find their favourite animals and even check the queue length and quality ratings at the ice cream kiosks!

# Thank you to all who help to make this wonderful venture a reality!
The kids had a lot of fun and it couldn’t have been done without the hard work and dedication of the wonderful volunteers; Kelly Jewell, Abigail Turner, Nastya Koro, Carolina Poll and Cassandra Melvin, Founder of Future Legends and all round wonder woman!

Big thanks to Novoda for supporting this initiative and helping us to inspire future leaders and innovators!

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