Stories

In the Fall of 2018, San José Public Library’s Berryessa Branch Library in Santa Clara County was introduced to the existence of MIT App Inventor and the global community of app developers around it by a volunteer. Berryessa Branch Library and Ashvin through his non-profit “No App Maker Left Behind” are both motivated to continue the series throughout the year and are working on future plans to spread the wealth of MIT App Inventor to young learners.

The following story is from MIT App Inventor Power User Peter Mathijssen.

For the first time App Inventor had a stand at Fosdem. FOSDEM is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. Taking place at the Université libre de Bruxelles (in English: Free University of Brussels) in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is widely recognised as the best such conference in Europe.

Last June 21-July 10, Peninsula Bridge partnered with Amazon Web Services and IDEO to offer a three-week long Computer Science BootCamp for 35 Peninsula Bridge high school students.

The project “Refugees go digital” is a series of workshops that addresses young refugees in so-called 'International Preparation Classes' in Hamburg/Germany

Youth Radio’s first app for showcasing long-form reporting, designed and developed in collaboration with an MIT program, is now available for Android phones on the Google Play store. The app stemmed from Youth Radio Interactive, an initiative of the Oakland, CA, media center that teaches young people to combine programming and journalism.

On May 17, 2014, The Computer App Programming Competition (CAP 2014) or CAP Day was held at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The competition was a great success and represents one of the largest collaborative efforts among university and secondary school teachers to promote programming education for secondary school students in Hong Kong. This year’s event adopted MIT App Inventor as the programming tool.

AT&T employees are actively involved in STEM training in their communities to promote and support innovation in young minds. In 2013, OASIS at AT&T (the South Asian Employee Organization at AT&T) set an ambitious goal to teach 1000 students how to make their own mobile applications using MIT App Inventor.

While many 12-year olds are playing video games or pulling pranks, this 12-year old came up with the idea for a winning app. Arjun Kumar won 1st place in the K-8 division of the 2012 MIT App Inventor competition. Arjun is a seventh grade student from Velammal Vidyashram school in Surapet, Chennai, India. His winning app is called Ez School Bus Locator. The app helps parents with and without smartphones view the live location of their child's school bus, check whether their child is inside the bus, and know when the school bus will reach the targeted destination.

Yu-Chang Hsu, a professor of educational technology at Boise State University, usually teaches grad students. But for the past two summers, he has taught high school seniors to make their own apps with App Inventor, as part of Upward Bound, a program designed to prepare low-income students for college enrollment. Hsu notes that making functional apps quickly is fun for students, and that app design is a great way to learn problem solving skills. One of his students, Shaleeni (shown here), won a state competition with the app she designed.

Technovation Challenge is the world’s largest and longest-running tech competition in which girls work with MIT App Inventor to design their own mobile apps. This year's challenge “What is a problem in your community for which you could create an app as a solution?” drew submissions from 114 teams of girls from around the world. The EPA Chica Squad from East Palo Alto, CA made it to the top 20 worldwide for their app to clean up trash and graffiti in their community.

Kerimil’s app pushes temperature data collected by an Arduino sensor to a Cosm website, Cosm being a service that enables the integration of apps and Arduino devices. Kerikil’s app uploads temperature data in real time at regular intervals of his choosing to the site. He has made his code easily available, and it’s a great jumping off point for designers looking to integrate and publish data from external sensors.

Developer Kerimil used App Inventor to quickly and easily develop a program that allows the user to turn an Arduino-driven LED on and off using voice commands. The user can also control the LED using buttons on the Android device. Kerimil’s project shows how easily even beginners can create an app that will interface with microcontrollers.

This "DroidBot" Android Robot is driven by Arduino components and controlled over BlueTooth by a mobile phone app developed with App Inventor. Marcelo Ávila de Oliveira, shared this charming video of the DroidBot responding to commands from the phone, set to the music "I Can Read Your Mind."

I.O.U was created by the Sparkling APPles team from Mountain View, California as part of the Technovation Challenge. Since most of the girls have no experience coding, they build their apps using App Inventor. "Because we needed to put together an app in such a short amount of time, App Inventor was a great program since it allowed us to fully understand programming concepts without requiring us to learn a programming language. With its intuitive functions and user interface, our group successfully created an app in under ten weeks!" stated Diana Gong.

The CAVE Education Group promotes robotics education in Taiwan. Their website http://www.appinventor.tw/ hosts many App Inventor lessons, particularly ones involving the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® components. In May 2012, the CAVE Education Groupreleased a book in Mandarin Chinese so that App Inventor users around the world would be able to follow tutorials and program apps for themselves.

At the University of San Francisco, App Inventor is taught as a core curriculum course to non-computer-science majors. Many of the students take the course because they hate Math and the course covers this dreaded requirement.

Ever try teaching computer science to a group of teenagers right after they get out of a long day at school? I would expect it to be remarkably difficult and frustrating. But that’s just what I did last week, and it was great. When I enrolled at Youth Radio three years ago as a 16-year-old interested in journalism, I had no idea that pretty soon I’d be teaching fellow teenagers how to create mobile apps.

Lucky for us at the Youth Radio’s Mobile Action Lab, we have been able to use an amazing tool to get these students excited and focused. We host week-long App Inventor Workshops, to get hands-on experiences with mobile app development, and hopefully to spark an interest in computer science.

My name is Pauline Lake and I am one of two Trinity College students whom was chosen to work with Trinity College's Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (HFOSS) during the summer of 2010. That summer I worked with another Trinity College student and two high school teachers to learn and evaluate App Inventor’s potential in K-12 education. I am a firm believer of hands-on education and using things that students are interested in, to motivate them to want to learn.

Ellen Spertus, professor at Mills College, discusses how she used App Inventor to teach CS0.

Leshell Hately talks about how she uses App Inventor to introduce computer science to African American youth from Washington DC.

At Boise State University, we offered an online workshop in summer 2011 and an online graduate course in fall 2011 on mobile app design for teaching and learning using App Inventor. The workshop was offered through Extended Studies, and the course was offered through Department of Educational Technology. Similar to much of the wonderful effort on AI for education around the globe, we have interesting curriculum and excited students.

Last May I started playing around with the idea of doing some sessions on Google App Inventor in my kids' Primary (K-12) School. I'd had great success trying it out with three of my own kids aged 12 to 7.