About 120 Montgomery County middle schoolers walked out of Montgomery College's Rockville campus on Friday, carrying working iPhone app prototypes they'd built in five days.

The students, rising sixth- through eighth-graders from across MCPS, spent the week learning Apple's Swift programming language and app design at Montgomery Can Code, a free summer camp that ended with a public showcase at the college's ignITe Hub. The program is a partnership among Montgomery College, MCPS, Montgomery County government, the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation and Apple.

The camp has served more than 6,000 students since launching in 2019, according to Kimberly Bloch-Rincan, the camp's project manager and director of the ignITe Hub at Montgomery College. It runs at four locations around the county over two weeks and offers a virtual option for families who can't make in-person sessions.

Bloch-Rincan told Bethesda Magazine the goal is "planting a seed" so students "get to open their minds to something else such as coding or the creativity of app design."

Student projects tackled real problems. Rattaphum Tongrugs, 12, a rising seventh-grader at Parkland Magnet Middle School in Rockville, built a navigation app for the Lancaster County Dutch Market in Germantown. He said he wanted to spotlight a community that typically gets overlooked.

Jayden Bougna, a rising sixth-grader at Neelsville Middle School in Germantown, prototyped a kid-friendly version of TikTok for ages 6 to 13. Zarya Boppana, 13, a rising eighth-grader at Parkland Middle School, created an inventory-and-orders tool for her own necklace business. Vincent Austin, a rising eighth-grader at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, designed a workforce management app for the Twinbrook Myanmar Mini-Mart, where his mother is a partner.

No prior coding experience is required. Students learn Swift fundamentals, then design and build a prototype app aimed at solving a problem they choose.

The camp is free and open to any MCPS middle schooler countywide, including families in the Churchill and Wootton clusters. The MCPS school year begins Tuesday, August 25. Families interested in future Montgomery Can Code sessions can check montgomerycancode.com for enrollment information.