Resources

Taught by Professor David Wolber at the University of San Francisco, this course offers an introduction to computer science for non­majors with little prior programming experience.

MIT Students Tony Chen, Mitchell Kates, and Marcus Lowe created these slides for an App Inventor hackathon at a local community center.

App Inventor Concept Cards provide a quick way to learn new App Inventor code and concepts. Each of the 13 cards can be printed out, folded in half, and used to prompt students to explore a concept in App Inventor such as timers, sounds, movement, math, multiple screens, making colors, etc. These cards are designed to introduce ideas to students in bite-sized snippets and can be worked into any lesson or tutorial.

App inventor currently does not give the ability to merge projects or to take a snippet of code from one project and add it to another.

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.

This 4-week summer graduate course "CS Principles For High School Teachers" was offered during the summer of 2012 to math teachers enrolled in John Carroll University's graduate program.

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.