Eighth Graders Code and Create Interactive Games

5/7/2025

It was “Game on!” for students in Rae Johnson’s innovation, engineering and computer science class.

The eighth graders are studying MIT App Inventor, a program that simulates the experience of designing user interface (UI) and code for a mobile app.

“We began the semester refreshing our coding skills by designing a simple photo gallery or music player, then dove into game design to learn about data and variables,” Johnson explained. “In this unit, students were learning to use lists of data to create interactive games.”

Bodhi Schiffman designed a game based on his passion for geography and presented it to the middle school community. “I came up with the idea to do a trivia game with flags and capitals,” he said. “I thought it was super fun, and I enjoy projects where you can really get creative and have a lot of leeway to do your own thing.”

Harrison Arak, who has been coding since he was young, is in the testing phase of his second game. “It's based on a new genre of games called an RNG or random number generator, where you randomly roll a number and based off of that action, something can happen,” he shared enthusiastically.

The assignment had music fan Kingsley Kweku transforming his love of hip-hop and R&B into something fun: “My game was a twist on the charades app where instead of showing a prompt, it would play a clip from a song and you have to guess what the song name is. You get a bonus point if you get the artist too.”

Overall, Kweku was impressed with his classmates’ knowledge. “There were some songs that were more popular than others that I put on there, but then I did add harder songs and they did pretty well,” he said.

Up next for this group, according to Johnson, “Students will brainstorm and code an app that addresses a health or wellness need.”

The Middle School was recently recognized as a Project Lead The Way (PLTW) Distinguished School. This honor is given to a select number of middle schools across the U.S. for providing broad access to transformative learning experiences for students through PLTW Gateway, a grade 6-8 STEM curriculum. Last year, the Upper School earned the same honor.