In the News

Congratulations to 2013 Verizon Innovative App Challenge Winners! The MIT App Inventor team will be sending trainers out to the ten winning schools to help the students use App Inventor to make their app design concepts fully functional.
Full Press Release...

Centro Superior para la Enseñanza Virtual (CSEV), our partner in the unX initiative, has been awarded the 2013 NMC Center of Excellence Award.

Recognized for developing inventive and interactive models to transmit knowledge on online environments through their unX program. The unX program delivers massively open online courses in an online learning and entrepreneurship community where members can learn, contribute, and enrich it progressively, adopting different roles in the educational process of open innovation.

Iridescent has released a captivating new public service announcement called "I Will Inspire". The goal of the ad is to encourage more girls to take part in the 12-week Technovation Challenge program. Enrollment information is online at www.technovationchallenge.org.

The National Science Foundation TUES program (Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has awarded a $565,836 grant to support mobile programming education with App Inventor. The project involves Wellesley College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and University of San Francisco. The focus of the project is to build online learning tools for App Inventor, with the goal of teaching computational thinking to beginners, especially non-CS-students.

The Principal Investigators of the project are:
Hal Abelson, MIT
Lyn Turbak, Wellesley
Ralph Morelli, Trinity
Fred Martin, UMass Lowell
David Wolber, USF

Collaborative Research: Computational Thinking Through Mobile Computing

This project introduces undergraduate students to computational thinking (CT) by engaging them to create apps for mobile phones and tablets that are both useful and personally meaningful. CT is a 21st century STEM literacy whose concepts are needed by informed citizens and workers to solve problems and understand complex systems in many domains.

In this project, students learn CT by creating mobile apps using App Inventor, a visual blocks-based programming environment. The project is developing online curricular modules that use mobile app programming to teach CT principles and mobile computing design concepts. These modules include web-based tutorials, video lectures, screencasts, programming exercises, and quizzes --- online materials that give students more in-class time to engage in active learning. Several introductory and intermediate courses are being developed based on these modules. The project is also devising, testing, and evaluating new techniques for assessing students' CT knowledge in the context of mobile computing and project-based courses.

In partnership with MIT's new Center for Mobile Learning, this project is widely disseminating curricular materials, course designs, and assessment rubrics, and is building a national community of undergraduate educators focused on teaching CT via mobile computing.

This project reflects mobile computing's transformation of society by building a curriculum in which undergraduates learn CT not by merely using apps, but by creating them. The materials developed in this project will support both novice and intermediate students in constructionist learning and in design, innovation, and entrepreneurship activities that connect computer science to other disciplines.