Explore MIT App Inventor - Paper

Democratizing mobile app development for disaster management

shay — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 18:29:54 +0000

Smartphones are being used for a wide range of activities including messaging, social networking, calendar and contact management as well as location and context-aware applications. The ubiquity of handheld computing technology has been found to be especially useful in disaster management and relief operations. Our focus is to enable developers to quickly deploy applications that take advantage of key sources that are fundamental for today's networked citizens, including Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, current news releases, and government data. These applications will also have the capability of empowering citizens involved in crisis situations to contribute via crowdsourcing, and to communicate up-to-date information to others. We will leverage several technologies to develop this application framework, namely (i) Linked Data principles for structured data, (ii) existing data sources and ontologies for disaster management, and (iii) App Inventor, which is a mobile application development framework for non-programmers. In this paper, we describe our motivating use cases, our architecture, and our prototype implementation.

Citation: Fuming Shih, Oshani Seneviratne, Ilaria Liccardi, Evan Patton, Patrick Meier, and Carlos Castillo. 2013. Democratizing mobile app development for disaster management. In Joint Proceedings of the Workshop on AI Problems and Approaches for Intelligent Environments and Workshop on Semantic Cities (AIIP '13), Sebastian Bader, Anika Schumann, Stephan Sigg, Freddy Lecue, Biplav Srivastava, Zaiqing Nie, and Christian Guttmann (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 39-42. DOI=10.1145/2516911.2516915 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2516911.2516915

Resource URL:

Full paper available in the ACM Digital Library

Grade Level:

Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science
Entrepreneurship

Resource Type:

Paper

MIT App Inventor: Enabling Personal Mobile Computing

shay — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:07:31 +0000

Authors: Shaileen Crawford Pokress, José Juan Dominguez Veiga
PRoMoTo 2013 Proceedings (arXiv:1309.5509)
October 2013

MIT App Inventor is a drag-and-drop visual programming tool for designing and building fully functional mobile apps for Android. App Inventor promotes a new era of personal mobile computing in which people are empowered to design, create, and use personally meaningful mobile technology solutions for their daily lives, in endlessly unique situations. App Inventor's intuitive programming metaphor and incremental development capabilities allow the developer to focus on the logic for programming an app rather than the syntax of the coding language, fostering digital literacy for all. Since it was moved from Google to MIT, a number of improvements have been added, and research projects are underway.

Resource URL:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.2830

Grade Level:

6-8
9-12
Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper

Mobile app design for teaching and learning: Educators’ experiences in an online graduate course

shay — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 18:21:50 +0000

Authors: Yu-Chang Hsu, Yu-Hui Ching, 2013.

This research explored how educators with limited programming experiences learned to design mobile apps through peer support and instructor guidance. Educators were positive about the sense of community in this online course. They also considered App Inventor a great web-based visual programming tool for developing useful and fully functioning mobile apps. They had great sense of empowerment through developing unique apps by using App Inventor. They felt their own design work and creative problem solving were inspired by the customized mobile apps shared by peers. The learning activities, including sharing customized apps, providing peer feedback, composing design proposals, and keeping design journals (blogging), complemented each other to support a positive sense of community and form a strong virtual community of learning mobile app design. This study helped reveal the educational value of mobile app design activities and the web-based visual programming tool, and the possibility of teaching/learning mobile app design online. The findings can also encourage educators to explore and experiment on the potential of incorporating these design learning activities in their respective settings, and to develop mobile apps for their diverse needs in teaching and learning.

Cite as: Hsu, Y. -C., & Ching, Y. -H. (2013). Mobile app design for teaching and learning: Educators’ experiences in an online graduate course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(4), 117-139.

Resource URL:

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1542

Grade Level:

Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper

Project Merger Tool: combine two App Inventor projects into one

shay — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:44:16 +0000

App Inventor Classic • App Inventor Classic • App Inventor Classic • App Inventor Classic

This information pertains to App Inventor Classic.   It is obsolete and is being kept here for historical reasons.    Information about the updated merger tool (for App Inventor 2) can be found here.

Developed by Kate Feeney of Mills College, the AI Merger Tool, allows multiple users to develop screens for the app in different projects on different or the same accounts and later merge the two App Inventor projects together. This tool will be very useful for classroom projects, and to anyone developing an app with a partner.

Related Reading:
Encouraging Collaboration: AIMerger Tool, thesis by Kate Feeney
ABSTRACT: App Inventor is a free, open source application that permits people with any level of programming background to create software applications for the Android operating system. At the time of its open source release, it lacked important resources for supporting collaboration: documentation for source code contributors and technological support for users developing apps in a group environment. To address these issues, I added a property to an existing component and then created detailed documentation about the process for future developers. I also created a tool for merging multiple projects, which will encourage teamwork by allowing multiple users to code separately and then combine their work. These contributions will increase collaboration among users as well as developers of App Inventor.

Download the AIMerger.jar file

Download the AIMergerDocumentation for more detailed instructions on how to use the AIMerger tool.

Files:

app_inv_companion_qr_store.png

Grade Level:

6-8
9-12
Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic
Intermediate
Advanced

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper
Tool

AppInventor Concept:

Subgoal-labeled instructional material improves performance and transfer in learning to develop mobile applications.

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 10:54:09 +0000

Mental models are mental representations of how an action changes a problem state. Creating a mental model early in the learning process is a strong predictor of success in computer science classes. One major problem in computer science education, however, is that novices have difficulty creating mental models perhaps because of the cognitive overload caused by traditional teaching methods. The present study employed subgoal-labeled instructional materials to promote the creation of mental models when teaching novices to program in Android App Inventor. Utilizing this and other well-established educational tools, such as scaffolding, to reduce cognitive load in computer science education improved the performance of participants on novel tasks when learning to develop mobile applications.

Resource URL:

Lauren E. Margulieux, Mark Guzdial, and Richard Catrambone. 2012.

Grade Level:

6-8
9-12
Undergraduate

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper

Empowering educators with Google's Android App Inventor: An online workshop in mobile app design

shay — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:58:25 +0000

Authors: Yu-Chang Hsu, Kerry Rice, Lisa Dawley
Published: British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 43, Issue 1, pages E1–E5, January 2012

Abstract:
Mobile devices, such as smartphones, are vastly gaining popularity (Johnson, Levine, Smith & Stone, 2010) because of their relatively strong computing capability built into small sizes, their Internet connectivity and the availability of various types and easy-to-use mobile software applications (“mobile apps”). It is estimated that by 2015, 80% of people accessing the Internet will do it through cell phones (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood, 2011). Mobile technologies are now gaining increased attention and popularity across education sectors, which have led to innovation in mobile app design (Johnson et al, 2010).

Android OS has now caught up and led the mobile OS market within the US with 38.1% share (Haselton, 2011). Android OS has the advantage of being open-source, customizable and allows for multitasking. As of July 2011, there were 250 000 Android apps on the Android Market, with a total of 4.5 billion downloads (Wikipedia, 2011a). With the public release of App Inventor, building mobile apps without prior coding experiences is now a possibility.

In this report, the authors describe an introductory-level mobile app design workshop developed and offered over 6 weeks in Summer 2011. We also discuss the challenges and instructional implications derived from our experiences with this workshop.

Resource URL:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01241.x/abstract

Grade Level:

9-12
Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper
Workshop

Android Game Development with App Inventor, by Anshul Bhagi

shay — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:38:16 +0000

Ever since App Inventor found a new home at MIT's Center for Mobile Learning in early 2012 (it was previously housed at Google), it has been receiving significant attention from educational communities that hope to use the tool to facilitate technology learning in the classroom and beyond. Much of App Inventor's current user base is teachers in high-schools and colleges, and as the tool continues to attract more users, it is likely that many of these users will be teachers of students in grades 3 thru 12 (i.e. students who are old enough to know how to use computers and design/develop apps, yet not experienced enough to get their hands dirty with the Android SDK). Students of this age group are quite fond of gaming, and so we anticipate that there will be a strong demand for developing graphically appealing, interactive single-player and multiplayer games using App Inventor in the coming years. It is therefore important that the App Inventor team at MIT 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.

Resource URL:

Download Paper (PDF)

Grade Level:

6-8
9-12
Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Basic
Intermediate

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Curriculum
Paper

Building Blocks for Mobile Games: A Multiplayer Framework for App Inventor for Android

shay — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:40:00 +0000

Author: Bill Magnuson Thesis submitted to MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Feb 2010Abstract: Building Blocks for Mobile Games is a 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 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. The default game server provides basic functionality that can be used to create simple multiplayer games and message passing applications, such as a multi user bulletin board. By using custom server modules, the game server can be enhanced to provide server commands that implement a wide range of operations. Custom modules were used with the system to develop a multi- player card game, a version of Bulls and Cows with a shared scoreboard, an ap- plication that accesses Amazon’s book search API and a pair of applications for creating, managing and voting in polls. Using App Inventor and the game framework, each of these applications can be created with only a basic understanding of mobile phones and client-server principles.

Resource URL:

Link to PDF (53MB)

Grade Level:

6-8
9-12
Undergraduate
Master's and Above

Difficulty Level:

Advanced

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper

Blocks Languages for Creating Tangible Artifacts

shay — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:50:09 +0000

Authors: Franklyn Turbak, Smaranda Sandu, Olivia Kotsopoulos, Emily Erdman, Erin Davis, and Karishma Chadha
Computer Science Department, Wellesley College
Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA

Abstract: Logo turtles and Henderson’s picture language have long been used to teach computational thinking by inspiring learners to construct programs that create complex geometric designs. We have developed visual blocks-based versions of these languages, TurtleBlocks and PictureBlocks, that allow users to transform their designs into tangible artifacts produced by laser cutters and vinyl cutters. Our languages embody two novel features. First, they use constructive area geometry to convert the geometric designs generated by our programs into formats suitable for laser and vinyl cutters. Second, they leverage static typing and polymorphism to provide a new way to reference the names of procedure parameters and local variables in a blocks language.

Resource URL:

http://cs.wellesley.edu/~fturbak/pubs/VLHCC-2012-paper-turbak.pdf

Grade Level:

Undergraduate

Difficulty Level:

Basic

Subject:

Computer Science

Resource Type:

Paper