North Bay teen spends summer teaching locals coding, developing for Apple

David Moore has been programming and coding since he was 10 years old. Now, he's teaching kids even younger that technology is nothing to be afraid of.

"It's really good to see kids starting at such a young age, because that's really when you have to start learning," Moore says.

The 17-year-old taught students from Grades 1 to 4 robotics basics for theNorth Bay Parry Sound Catholic District School Board.The classes happened during the school board's numeracy and literacy summer camp.

From Lego to coding

Moore says they started with some Legokits that could be created and programmed using an iPad app. He says this process helped teach students basic programming skills in a simple, but rigid way.

The students caught on quickly, and many of the older kids moved on to write their own code. Eventually, some of them were able to program their robots with their own code and connect themto other devices over Bluetooth.

"It was really cool to see each kid interact with all of this technology," says Moore.

New apps to be released, tested this fall

The camp ended in late July, but the northern Ontario programmer is still going strong with his own projects. Moore says he has two apps in development right now.

One is called "Sensibility," which gives context to text messages. The app is meant to help convey emotions like sarcasm or joy.

There's an intelligence aspect to the technology, so that the app is able to tag messages over time for the same emotion. Moore says he expects this app will be released with iOS 11 this fall.

His second app is called "Coalescent," a software for education management and development. Moore says most learning management systems aren't useful for both instructors and students, so he's separating his software into two parts one version for each audience.

"Coalescent" has a built-in lesson editor, which gives instructors a streamlined place to do their lesson work. Moore says this app is going through pre-release testing near the beginning of September.