Teaching CS principles with app inventor

Gray, Jeff; Abelson, Harold; Wolber, David; Friend, Michelle

doi:10.1145/2184512.2184628

Cited by 43 publications

(27 citation statements)

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“…App Inventor has become popular in the classroom for introductory courses for computing students [5,10,12,13] and to a lesser extent with general students [4]. The course structure reported here is similar to these other uses of App Inventor; this paper matches particular features of App Inventor to different types of learning and suggests a structured assessment process to better evaluate student`s learning outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

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Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

Honig

2013

Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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Visual programming tools and mobile device applications are a natural tool to engage university students; but, are they effective in teaching quantitative thinking skills to non computer science majors? Answering this question can be based on careful assessment of the learning outcomes. This paper reports the results from teaching over 100 students mobile app development with App Inventor in a university core course. Results were measured using an assessment process motivated by Bloom's Taxonomy that included student self assessment, ratings by instructors, and comparisons of the two results. The categories in the assessment were mapped to specific levels of skills with various App Inventor components.Results presented here confirm App Inventor's effectiveness and ability to motivate students. App Inventor features and components that most impacted the student learning are noted.The assessment results show the course was very successful particularly in the three assessment categories of Remembering, Understanding, and Application (Lower Order Thinking Skills) and acceptably successful in Analysis, Evaluating, and Creating (Higher Order Thinking Skills). The paper concludes with suggestions on continued improvement of the course content and additional App Inventor features that should become part of the assessment process.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…App Inventor is descendent from Scratch and was developed by Google and later transferred to MIT's Center for Mobile Learning. App Inventor and its graphical programming tools are not described in detail here (see [5,10,12] for more on App Inventor. )…”

Section: Visual Programming With App Inventormentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

Honig

2013

Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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“…From the programming education perspective, it stands out among the other blocks-based languages with its features of (a) possibly targeting not only children but adults (b) targeting smart mobile devices, (c) enabling the creation of real-life applications that might actually prove useful to a larger audience (Spertus, Chang, Gestwicki, & Wolber, 2010;Wolber, 2011). These features led educators to soon discover that App Inventor may genuinely possess educational value, hence leading to many papers proposing the use of App Inventor in programming classes (Gray, Abelson, Wolber, & Friend, 2012;Karakus, Uludag, Guler, Turner, & Ugur, 2012;Krishnendu Roy, 2012;Spertus et al, 2010;Wolber, 2011). These publications emphasized the fact that App Inventor may increase student motivation and its simplicity may benefit novices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching GUI-Programming Concepts to Prospective K12 ICT Teachers: MIT App Inventor as an Alternative to Text-Based Languages

Mihci¹,

Dönmez²

2017

International Journal of Research in Education and Science

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The purpose of this research is to investigate the short and long-term effects of using GUI-oriented visual Blocks-Based Programming languages (BBL) as a 2 nd tier tool when teaching programming to prospective K12 ICT teachers. In a mixed-method approach, the effect on academic success as well as the impact on professional opinions and preferences have been gathered for drawing deeper conclusions. Conclusively, it was understood that visual BBL increased success for students who were previously having a hard time dealing with text-based programming. However, students that were already accustomed to text-based programming have shown failure adapting to the BBL. This has been interpreted as a failure of previous programming courses in terms of enabling learning transfer. Additionally, it has been understood that employing the BBL has not been entirely effective in causing prospective ICT teachers to think that programming is a subject suitable for a considerably younger target audience.

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“…Although Android devices are used in many academic settings 2,3,4,5 , they are used as general-purpose computers. Our work looks at an Android device from a different perspective.…”

Section: Objectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Android Device as a "Programmable" Sensor Module

Chu¹

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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An Android device is a miniature computer with a touch screen and an array of sensors. There are many used and inexpensive entry-level Android phones and tablets available. In this paper, we describe an innovative method to transform an Android device into a versatile "programmable" I/O sensor module. It uses a serial Bluetooth adaptor and a custom app to obtain the desired sensor measurements and user inputs. The Bluetooth adaptor creates a wireless serial port and the Android app retrieves the desired sensor information, formats the data into a byte stream, and transmits it via the Bluetooth link. The app development is done in the App Inventor platform, which is based on a visual programming environment and can be quickly learned. Students can easily develop basic, functional apps and create a customized I/O module that can be incorporated into microcontroller, digital systems, or embedded systems projects.

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Teaching CS principles with app inventor

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

Teaching GUI-Programming Concepts to Prospective K12 ICT Teachers: MIT App Inventor as an Alternative to Text-Based Languages

Android Device as a "Programmable" Sensor Module

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