Ulta’s Day of Code, a  Everyone Can Code event for Chicago public school kids

Hello World.

In partnership with Apple and CPS, Ulta hosted a Day of Code at our downtown Chicago office. Students from LakeView High School and Michele Clark were walked through the development lifecycle of a feature, from requirements to development, to getting the app on the app store. We also spent some time introducing the students to the Ulta Beauty brand and high level stats about our company.

Joe Rago, Director of Digital Innovation starts the day off.

We also built an app just for this day so the students could have something tangible to correlate some of our coding topics as we provide the students with the GitHub repo for the app. We did our best to represent all common iOS app view patterns, as well as latest Swift syntax.

Another cool feature in the app is we did a little of  the school branding and let students choose their school – doing so updates the app icon and provides with school specific details.

Sasha Smith and Jenni Urban talk about CX while having the students work together on prototypes.