Stories

Yu-Chang Hsu, a professor of educational technology at Boise State University, usually teaches grad students. But for the past two summers, he has taught high school seniors to make their own apps with App Inventor, as part of Upward Bound, a program designed to prepare low-income students for college enrollment. Hsu notes that making functional apps quickly is fun for students, and that app design is a great way to learn problem solving skills. One of his students, Shaleeni (shown here), won a state competition with the app she designed.

Technovation Challenge is the world’s largest and longest-running tech competition in which girls work with MIT App Inventor to design their own mobile apps. This year's challenge “What is a problem in your community for which you could create an app as a solution?” drew submissions from 114 teams of girls from around the world. The EPA Chica Squad from East Palo Alto, CA made it to the top 20 worldwide for their app to clean up trash and graffiti in their community.

Kerimil’s app pushes temperature data collected by an Arduino sensor to a Cosm website, Cosm being a service that enables the integration of apps and Arduino devices. Kerikil’s app uploads temperature data in real time at regular intervals of his choosing to the site. He has made his code easily available, and it’s a great jumping off point for designers looking to integrate and publish data from external sensors.

Bunny Bolt is an outdoor fitness app developed by a group of Wellesley students that uses the threat of killer bunnies to get kids ages 8-14 outside. Created with App Inventor, the game tracks players as they physically move around capturing virtual escaped magician’s rabbits.

This "DroidBot" Android Robot is driven by Arduino components and controlled over BlueTooth by a mobile phone app developed with App Inventor. Marcelo Ávila de Oliveira, shared this charming video of the DroidBot responding to commands from the phone, set to the music "I Can Read Your Mind."

The University of San Francisco's App Inventor course attracts nontechnical students and has encouraged women to consider majoring in computer science. Business Week ran this video story featuring students Kelly Lazzara and Andrea Conway, and their professor David Wolber, speaking about how the course opens up the field of computer science in an approachable, fun, and engaging way by allowing them to quickly build apps for real-world purposes.

The CAVE Education Group promotes robotics education in Taiwan. Their website http://www.appinventor.tw/ hosts many App Inventor lessons, particularly ones involving the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® components. In May 2012, the CAVE Education Groupreleased a book in Mandarin Chinese so that App Inventor users around the world would be able to follow tutorials and program apps for themselves.

At the University of San Francisco, App Inventor is taught as a core curriculum course to non-computer-science majors. Many of the students take the course because they hate Math and the course covers this dreaded requirement.

Lawrence County High School students in Alabama developed a simple app to document hog sightings. The data collected in the field will aid scientists in understanding the problem of invasive feral hogs. The app earned third place in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Contest, winning $100,000 in tech prizes for our school. The contest required the students to select an environmental problem in our local area and use STEM to work toward a solution.

At Boise State University, we offered an online workshop in summer 2011 and an online graduate course in fall 2011 on mobile app design for teaching and learning using App Inventor. The workshop was offered through Extended Studies, and the course was offered through Department of Educational Technology. Similar to much of the wonderful effort on AI for education around the globe, we have interesting curriculum and excited students.

Elizabeth Soep from Youth Radio talks about how her students learn to become creators of technology platforms that distribute media stories.

Leshell Hately talks about how she uses App Inventor to introduce computer science to African American youth from Washington DC.

In August 2011, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Computer Society asked Jeremy Scott to exemplify the teaching of Computing Science to Scotland’s junior high school students. Here’s his App Inventor story…

For over twenty years, desktop operating systems were the basis of most students’ experience of Computing. Today’s learners have a different experience of Computing: it’s on-line, social and increasingly mobile. Computing devices have become more tactile and personal, the result of convergence of numerous technologies from multi-touch to motion-sensing and GPS.

Ever try teaching computer science to a group of teenagers right after they get out of a long day at school? I would expect it to be remarkably difficult and frustrating. But that’s just what I did last week, and it was great. When I enrolled at Youth Radio three years ago as a 16-year-old interested in journalism, I had no idea that pretty soon I’d be teaching fellow teenagers how to create mobile apps.

Lucky for us at the Youth Radio’s Mobile Action Lab, we have been able to use an amazing tool to get these students excited and focused. We host week-long App Inventor Workshops, to get hands-on experiences with mobile app development, and hopefully to spark an interest in computer science.