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.
CLICK HERE TO START
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
CLICK HERE AND HERE TO START
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