Resources

Middle School teacher Richard Incorvia has put together some simple, easy-to-follow tutorials for teaching App Inventor to students. These can be used with older students as well.

In his master's thesis Anshul Bhagi examines App Inventor game development. First he discusses the interest students have in developing graphically appealing, interactive single-player and multiplayer games using App Inventor. Bhagi then segues into a discussion of how the App Inventor team at MIT can prepare for the imminent growth of the App Inventor game development community. Accordingly, this thesis looks at where App Inventor currently stands with respect to game development and how its game development capabilities can be improved and extended.

Author Bill Magnuson explains the client-server multiplayer game building framework for the App Inventor for Android platform. The framework includes an App Inventor component and a game server running on Google App Engine. The client side component (called Game Client) packages the complexity of web service calls, data transfer and game state management into a set of graphical code blocks that allow users without programming experience to create Android applications that can access the game server API.

In this paper, Turbak and colleagues from Wellesley College describe how visual blocks-based programming languages, Turtle Blocks and Picture Blocks, allow users to transform their designs into tangible artifacts by using laser cutters and vinyl cutters.

Anshul Bhagi, as part of his thesis, created this deck of 20 cards, each containing a bite-sized snippet of blocks code to help students learn programming concepts through App Inventor.

In response to interest in App Inventor from Kentucky’s Students Technology Leadership Program, the Kentucky Academy of Technology Education (KATE) hosted two, two day, App Inventor trainings.

We are Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, a 2010 winner of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning global competition.

In this course, students learned how to access the world of mobile services and applications as creators, not just consumers. They will learn to create entertaining and socially useful apps that can be shared with friends and family. In addition to learning to program and how to become better problem solvers, students will also explore the exciting world of computer science from the perspective of mobile computing and its increasingly important effect on society. This course is similar to and borrows from Dave Wolber’s course. Lectures and homework assignments are mapped to the App Inventor book. Students maintain portfolios of their work. In addition, it is one of several CS Principles pilot courses and maps the course materials to the CS Principles curriculum.

Teaching a course on App Inventor? This site provides a framework for doing so. David Wolber from the University of San Francisco has taught introductory CS for non-majors (CS0), but the materials could be adapted for a CS1 course for majors as well, or for a high school course. You can also pick and choose from the seven available modules, or just give a two or three week intro to App Inventor with the introductory modules.