In 20 minutes, make a “Meet my Classmates” app that lets you and students view everyone’s names and pictures and lets you generate random pairs of students for in-class work. You’ll use Thunkable and “appify” your spreadsheet of students.

• If you don’t have one, register for a free account at thunkable.com
• Open the sample google sheet ClassRoster22 and choose File | Make a Copy to create your own spreadsheet. You need your own copy because your app can only access sheets you own. For now, keep the sample data in it (it has people who helped out on the Thunkable book).
• In Thunkable, open the template app. Play with it to see what it does. Then choose “Copy Project” in the top-right menu. This will create your own copy of the project.
• Your copy won’t work because it tries to open a sheet you don’t own. So you need to modify your copy of the app to use the sheet you created.
• First, choose the “Data ” icon in the left menu and add a new data source which links to the spreadsheet you created. Leave the original spreadsheet (ClassRoster22) for now as well, so that you have two data sources.
• On Screen1, click on the Data Grid List in the screen and modify its properties on the right so its data source is the one you just added instead of “ClassRoster22”. You’ll need to reset the fields that appear in the list items: the title and the pic. Preview the app–does the data from your sheet appear?
• Next, Change the blocks in the ProfileScreen and PairScreen so that the blocks refer to your new data source instead of the old one. When you make the changes, be sure and reset the column name of each block. For instance, when you change the block below, make sure you re-select “name” as the column chosen.

Your students (users) will need a Thunkable account to use the app. Ask them to download the free “Thunkable Live” app on their phone, then give them the link to the app you created and they can run the app (through Thunkable Live).

One fun thing about the “Meet my Classmates” app is its customizable. Give your students an exercise of updating the app, e.g., have a contest to see who can make the best “guessing game” for learning everyone’s names.