Friday 29 January 2016

NEWS POST: Tools For Any Prospective Nigerian App Inventor



MIT App Inventor for Android
App Inventor for Android is an open-source web application originally provided by Google, and now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
It allows newcomers to computer programming to create software applications for the Android operating system (OS). It uses a graphical interface, very similar to Scratch and the StarLogo TNG user interface, which allows users to drag-and-drop visual objects to create an application that can run on Android devices. In creating App Inventor, Google drew upon significant prior research in educational computing, as well as work done within Google on online development environments.
App Inventor and the projects on which it is based are informed by constructionist learning theories, which emphasizes that programming can be a vehicle for engaging powerful ideas through active learning. As such, it is part of an ongoing movement in computers and education that began with the work of Seymour Papert and the MIT Logo Group in the 1960s and has also manifested itself with Mitchel Resnick's work on Lego Mindstorms and StarLogo.
History
The application was made available through request on July 12, 2010, and released publicly on December 15, 2010. The App Inventor team was led by Hal Abelson and Mark Friedman. In the second half of 2011, Google released the source code, terminated its server, and provided funding for the creation of The MIT Center for Mobile Learning, led by App Inventor creator Hal Abelson and fellow MIT professors Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. The MIT version was launched in March 2012.
On December 6, 2013 (the start of the Hour of Code), MIT released App Inventor 2, renaming the original version "App Inventor Classic" Major differences are:
Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) and is derived from master's thesis research by Ricarose Roque. Professor Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program supported the distribution of Open Blocks under an MIT License. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to StarLogo TNG, a project of STEP, and Scratch, a project of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group. App Inventor 2 replaced Open Blocks with Blockly, a blocks editor that runs within the browser.
As of May 2014, were 87 thousand weekly active users of the service and 1.9 million registered users in 195 countries for a total of 4.7 million apps built.
As December 2015, had 140k weekly active users and 4 million registered users in 195 countries, nun total of 12 million built applications.
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AppInventor.org
AppInventor.org is a site for learning and teaching how to program mobile apps with MIT's App Inventor. These tutorials are refined versions of the tutorials that have been on the Google and MIT App Inventor sites from App Inventor's inception-- thousands of beginners have used them to learn programming and learn App Inventor.
This site is also designed for use by teachers. The teaching materials here have been used as a basis for numerous middle school, high school, and college courses. The course-in-a-box, which is based on Wolber's USF courses, provides structure and material to get a new course up and running within days.
Your guide in these pursuits is David Wolber, Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. Wolber began teaching App Inventor as part of Google's 2009 pilot program and has taught more App Inventor courses and workshops than any human alive. His USF course, "Computing, Mobile Apps, and the Web", has served as a model for teaching non-CS-majors and interesting them in computing. The apps created by his students -- mostly humanities and business majors with no prior programming experience -- have been chronicled in several articles shown below.
In 2010 Wolber received a grant from Google to work with the App Inventor team and author the original advanced tutorials that appear on the App Inventor site.
In 2011, Wolber's book App Inventor: Create your own Android apps was published by O'Reilly. In this book, Wolber teams with MIT Professor and App Inventor creator Hal Abelson as well as Ellen Spertus and Liz Looney from the App Inventor team. This book is available in paperback at Amazon and on-line for free here at appinventor.org.
In 2012, Wolber was part of a collaborative project awarded a National Science Foundation TUES grant (Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM). The grant team, including USF, MIT (Abelson), Wellesley (Franklyn Turbak), UMass-Lowell (Fred Martin), and Trinity College (Ralph Morelli), is tasked with developing materials for teaching mobile programming to beginners.
In 2013, Wolber was awarded a Keck Foundation grant to initiate the Democratize Computing Lab at USF
In 2014, Wolber and his co-authors published an App Inventor 2 version of App Inventor: Create your own Android apps
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