From kid-friendly TikTok to Amish market navigator, middle schoolers display creative coding 

Friday showcase culmination of free week-long camp with MCPS, Montgomery College

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July 27, 2026 11:13 a.m.

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About 120 rising sixth, seventh and eighth-grade students from Montgomery County Public Schools presented their original mobile app prototypes on Friday at Montgomery College’s Rockville campus. 

Their ideas – ranging from a kid-friendly TikTok to an Amish market navigator to a business organizing tool – came about after a week of Montgomery Can Code, a free camp for budding innovators through hands-on computer science experiences.

“What the students do is they learn Apple’s Swift coding language,” Kimberly Bloch-Rincan, the camp project manager and director for the ignITe Hub at Montgomery College, told Bethesda Today. “They learn coding and then they also learn app design as well, so they put it together.” 

The camp, which started in 2019, has served more than 6,000 students from across the county, according to Bloch-Rincan. The camp runs at four different locations around the county over two weeks, and also has a virtual option as well.

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Throughout the week, as students learned these skills, they created a prototype app aimed to help solve a problem of their choosing.

Rattaphum Tongrugs, 12, built an app prototype for the Lancaster County Dutch Market in Germantown where customers could see the different stores of the market and their various offerings.

Tongrugs, a rising seventh grader at Rockville’s Parkland Magnet Middle School, said he wanted to spotlight a community that typically gets overlooked.

“The Amish have contributed a lot to society, [but] they barely get recognized,” Tongrugs told Bethesda Today.

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Jayden Bougna, a rising sixth grader at Germantown’s Neelsville Middle School, made a kid-friendly version of the popular social media app TikTok.

Bougna’s version was designed for kids ages 6-13, and could filter their content on topics such as animals, sports, or video games.

Bougna told Bethesda Today that while he doesn’t have TikTok currently, he may be able to convince his mom to allow him to get his TikTok for Kids prototype if it was on the market.

For Zarya Boppana, 13, a rising eighth-grader at Parkland Middle School, the problem solving was personal. She wanted to make something useful for her necklace business. Her app allowed business owners to see their inventory, orders and calendar all in one place.

Vincent Austin, a rising eighth grader at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, made an employee workforce app for the Twinbrook Myanmar Mini-Mart, which his mother is a partner.

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Austin told Bethesda Today that he didn’t really envision creating a workforce management app, but says his app, which allows employees to request shift coverage and view their daily schedule, would make it easier to do their jobs.

Bloch-Rincan told Bethesda Today that fostering the creativity and problem-solving skills of the students is what the camp is all about.

“My favorite part about working on this summer program is to see the students in action,” she said. “For me, … it’s about planting a seed, so that these students can number one, have fun out of school time experience in the summertime, and they get to open their minds to something else such as coding or the creativity of app design.”

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine