This is a project course about mobile applications for education. The focus is empowering kids and beginning programmers to create their own mobile apps using MIT App Inventor. AppInventor is a cloudbased development environment where people quickly create apps for Android devices by plugging together program blocks with a graphical user interface. It runs as a free worldwide service with about 30,000 unique active users a week about half a million users total. In this course, you'll work with App Inventor both as a user and as a system developer.
We'll focus on new ideas that demonstrate the potential of mobile computing, and we'll explore these ideas by creating working prototypes. You will implement several prototypes over the course of the semester in projects that span the spectrum of mobile computing: standalone disconnected apps, multiperson games and other shared apps, clients for web services and databases, and interfaces to instruments and sensors.
Projects may be individual or team projects; you will be involved in both types during the semester. You'll start by creating your own educational apps, working in App Inventor. Then you'll implement your own extensions to the App Inventor system, programming in Java with the Android SDK, and you'll demonstrate these extensions with new educational applications. Some projects will include backend integration with web services and databases. You'll build those back ends using Google App Engine and programming in Python.
Resource URL:
Grade Level:
- Undergraduate
Difficulty Level:
- Advanced
Subject:
- Computer Science
- Entrepreneurship
Resource Type:
- Curriculum