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The Daily Beast. Thanks for your feedback! Second, it reduces the chances of users introducing cyclic memory dependencies in the user interface that would eventually cause the app to run out of memory. This encourages app inventors to think about how to appropriately structure their applications and reuse components to avoid overloading the system or their end users.

This is unlike most programming languages, which are more aligned with machine architecture and therefore start at 0. See Fig. The traditional build cycle for an Android app involves writing code in a text editor or integrated development environment, and rebuilding the application for testing may often take minutes, whereas making a change in the live development environment typically takes effect in 1—2 s.

Seeing changes reflected in the app quickly means that students can explore and even make mistakes while exploring, because the time cost of those mistakes is relatively small. The App Inventor project began at Google in when Prof. The project leads were inspired by increased interest in educational blocks programming languages, such as Scratch, and the release of the new Android operating system.

In this section, we briefly cover inception and early development of the App Inventor platform, first at Google, and then at MIT. Abelson had previously taught a course at MIT on mobile programming, but at the time mobile app development required significant investment on the part of developers and development environments.

Also in , Google publicly announced the Android operating system. The project was intended to help younger learners program for Android. The Google version of the project terminated at the end of , but the educational technology was transferred to MIT so that development and educational aspects could continue Kincaid, Abelson joined Prof. Much of the development focused on increasing capabilities to support educational goals of the project.

At this time, the team developed additional curricula, making them freely available to teachers for computer science and computational thinking education. The MIT team also hosted a number of 1-day workshops, primarily around the northeast United States, training teachers in the pedagogy of App Inventor. We now focus on guided and open exploration in our materials rather than presenting students with step-by-step instructions in order to encourage self-guided learning.

By making mistakes, students have the opportunity to practice more of the computational thinking principles, such as debugging, described by Brennan and Resnick App Inventor team also developed Internet of Things related extensions so learners could interact with physical hardware external to their mobile devices, and to leverage the growing collection of small computer boards, such as Arduino, BBC micro:bit, and Raspberry Pi.

To this day, the team continues its work of development, creating complementary educational materials in parallel. The primary aim of MIT App Inventor is providing anyone with an interest in building apps to solve problems with the tools necessary to do so. Instructional materials developed by the team are primarily oriented toward teachers and students at the middle- and high-school levels, but app inventors come in all ages from around the world.

In this section, we describe a few of the key components of the MIT App Inventor educational strategy, including massively online open courses MOOCs focused on MIT App Inventor, the Master Trainer MT program, the extensions functionality of App Inventor that allows incorporation of new material for education, and research projects that have leveraged App Inventor as a platform for enabling domain-specific computing.

A desire to learn computational thinking has driven a proliferation of online educational material that anyone can access to increase their knowledge and understanding.

As we continue to integrate information technology into our daily lives, mobile devices, and other new technologies, we can observe that a deeper understanding of computing is necessary to be an effective member of society, and those who learn computational thinking will have an advantage in our knowledge-driven economy. Many massive open online courses have been developed wholely or in part using App Inventor. Students therefore can both build their own mobile apps and learn core competencies related to computation.

MIT provides special instruction to educators through the Master Trainers program. Skilled App Inventor educators were recruited and given a small amount of special training to help mentor and train teams who subsequently won the App Challenge. The MOOC is highly integrated with computational thinking concepts, giving students a strong foundation in the concepts and practices associated with computational thinking.

Lastly, there is an on-site 3-day workshop at MIT where participants dive into App Inventor features and learn to use App Inventor in a classroom to foster creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. At the time of writing, there were 57 master trainers in 19 countries.

Anyone with Java and Android programming experience can write their own components for App Inventor using our extension mechanism. For example, MIT recently published a suite of Internet of things IOT -related extensions 2 for interfacing with Arduino and BBC micro:bit microcontrollers, with support for other platforms in development.

Using these extensions, teachers can assemble custom curricula to leverage these technologies in the classroom and encourage their students to explore the interface between the world of software and the world of hardware. We foresee the development of extensions related to artificial intelligence technologies, including deep learning, device support for image recognition, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and more.

Ideally, these complex technologies could be leveraged by anyone looking to solve a problem with the smartphone as a platform. In addition to its pedagogical applications, App Inventor offers excellent opportunities for research in education and other areas.

Usability in domain-specific contexts, such as humanitarian needs Jain et al. By placing the output of student programming on mobile devices, App Inventor allows students to move their work out of traditional computer labs, and into their everyday lives and communities. This transition has powerful implications for what students create and how they envision themselves as digital creators. Below, we outline how App Inventor moves computing education from a focus on the theoretical to a focus on the practical, how we can reconceptualize computing education through a lens of computational action, and how we support students to engage in a broader community of digitally empowered creators.

Traditional computer science curricula at the university level often focus on theory and include evaluation tools e. Instead, App Inventor curricula focus on using a language practically to solve real-world problems. Rather than placing emphasis on learning concepts such as linked lists or key—value mappings, App Inventor hides the complexity of these data structures behind blocks so that students can spend more time designing apps that perform data collection and analysis, or integrate with a range of sensors and actuators interacting with external environments.

This allows for a top-down, goal-based decomposition of the problem rather than a bottom-up approach, although App Inventor does not preclude such a strategy. The concept of computational thinking was first used by Seymour Papert in his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas ; however, it was largely brought into the mainstream consciousness by Jeannette Wing in For Wing, computational thinking is the ability to think like a computer scientist.

However, the explosive growth of computational thinking has also resulted in a fragmentation of its meaning, with educational researchers, curriculum designers, and teachers using different definitions, educational approaches, and methods of assessments Denning, There have been attempts to reconcile these differences National Academy of Sciences, and to bring leading researchers together to compare and contrast these perspectives Tissenbaum et al.

For most educational practitioners and researchers, computational thinking is dominated by an epistemological focus on computational thinking, in which students learn programming concepts such as loops, variables, and data handling and the use of abstractions to formally represent relationships between computing and objects in the real world Aho, Papert went further, arguing that students should be encouraged to follow their own projects and that learning the necessary skills and knowledge would arise as students encountered new problems and needed to solve or not solve them.

This position of computational thinking and computing education fits more naturally with the ways that professionals engage in computer science: in pursuit of finishing a project, problems naturally come up and computer scientists reach out to the community through sites like Stack Overflow, or search the web for tutorials or other support. This disconnect between how we teach computing and how it is practiced in the real world requires us to critically reexamine theoretical and practical approaches.

Below, we argue for an approach to computing education, termed computational action, that we believe matches these broader ideals.

While the growth of computational thinking has brought new awareness to the importance of computing education, it has also created new challenges. Many educational initiatives focus solely on the programming aspects, such as variables, loops, conditionals, parallelism, operators, and data handling Wing, , divorcing computing from real-world contexts and applications. This decontextualization threatens to make learners believe that they do not need to learn computing, as they cannot envision a future in which they will need to use it, just as many see math and physics education as unnecessary Flegg et al.

This decontextualization of computing education from the actual lives of students is particularly problematic for students underrepresented in the fields of computing and engineering, such as women and other learners from nondominant groups.

For these students, there is a need for their work to have an impact in their community and for it to help them develop a sense of fit and belonging Pinkard et al.

Lee and Soep argue that a critical perspective for computing is essential for students to develop a critical consciousness around what they are learning and making, moving beyond simply programming, instead of asking the students what they are programming and why they are programming it. In response, the App Inventor team advocates for a new approach to computing education that we call computational action. The computational action perspective on computing argues that while learning about computing, young people should also have opportunities to create with computing which have direct impact on their lives and their communities.

Through our work with App Inventor, we have developed two key dimensions for understanding and developing educational experiences that support students in engaging in computational action: 1 computational identity and 2 digital empowerment.

Digital empowerment involves instilling in them the belief that they can put their computational identity into action in authentic and meaningful ways. Computational action shares characteristics with other approaches for refocusing computing education toward student-driven problem-solving, most notably computational participation Kafai, Both computational action and computational participation recognize the importance of creating artifacts that can be used by others.

However, there is a slight distinction between the conceptualizations of community in the two approaches. In computational participation, community largely means the broader community of learners engaging in similar computing practices e. This computational identity element of computational action acknowledges the importance of learners feeling a part of a computing community i. A small group of young app builders, such as those described below, may develop significant applications and believe they are authentically part of the computing community, without having connected with or engaged with it in a deep or sustained way as would be expected in computational participation.

Across these projects, we see students engaging with and facilitating change in their communities, while simultaneously developing computational identities. We started the App of the Month program in in order to encourage App Inventors to share their work with the community. Submissions must be App Inventor Gallery links, so that any user can remix winning apps.

Furthermore, apps are judged in two divisions: youth and adult. More youth tend to submit than adults, and significantly more male users submit than female users, especially in the adult division. While submissions come in from all over the world, India and the USA are most highly represented. Themes of submitted apps vary widely. Adults often submit learning apps for small children. Classic games, such as Pong, also get submitted quite frequently.

Teachers tend to submit apps that they use in their classrooms. Perhaps most importantly, students and adults alike submit apps designed to solve problems within their own lives or their communities. For example, a recent submitter noticed that the Greek bus system is subject to many slowdowns, so he built an app that tracks buses and their routes.

Similarly, a student noticed that many of her peers were interested in reading books, but did not know how to find books they would like, so she built an app that categorizes and suggests popular books based on the Goodreads website. However, not all users fit the same mold. One student found that he enjoys logic- and math-based games, and after submitting regularly for about a year, his skill improved tremendously. Hundreds of people have remixed his apps from the Gallery, and even downloaded them from the Google Play Store, encouraging the student to pursue a full-time career in game development.

The App of the Month program, as a whole, encourages users to think of App Inventor as a tool they can use in their daily lives and off-the-screen communities. It also provides incentive to share their apps and recognition for their hard work. Users go to App Inventor to solve problems—which makes them App Inventors themselves. We have seen in detail many aspects of the MIT App Inventor program from the development and educational perspective.

There are some misconceptions, limitations, and benefits that are important to highlight. One common position detractors take is that blocks programming is not real programming often comparing blocks languages to text languages. This is a false dichotomy if one understands programming to be the act of describing to a computer some realization of a Turing machine. The examples presented in earlier sections highlight how people use MIT App Inventor to solve real problems they face in their communities.

To this end, younger individuals recognize that through tools such as App Inventor they can effect real change in their community, if not the whole world. Another common misconception is that creating mobile applications is something that only experts and those who have a lot of experience programming can do.

However, students across the K spectrum use App Inventor to develop their own mobile applications with little to no prior experience. This intervention has enabled these elementary students to learn both to think computationally and to develop their own apps to address local issues Kong et al.

Computational proficiency is often assessed in traditional textual representations; for example, the AP Computer Science A exam is assessed in the Java programming language. For students who learn in block-based representations, it can be difficult to transition to textual representations. Therefore, it is important to help students transition to textual languages, while ensuring that knowledge gained in the visual language is not lost.

Another current limitation of App Inventor is that its design inhibits code reuse. While App Inventor provides a gallery for publishing completed app source code, the community has yet to develop the granularity of libraries common in other programming languages.

This presents an opportunity to continue to grow the platform and user community and is a worthy subject for further exploration. Users of the App Inventor platform benefit from being able to repurpose the computational thinking skills they learn to interface with physical space in the external world.

The visual programming of App Inventor and the abstraction and compartmentalization of concepts into components and blocks allow the app inventor to focus more on decomposing their problems into solvable elements. The facility of running apps on mobile devices allows the students to experience their own apps as part of an ecosystem they interact with daily, and with which they are intimately familiar.

Since this encapsulation reduces the time it takes to build an app, even a straightforward prototype, app inventors can quickly grasp and iterate without paying a significant cost in terms of a compile-load-run cycle that is typical with mobile app development. The MIT App Inventor project continues to push the boundaries of education within the context of mobile app development. Its abstraction of hardware capabilities and the reduction of complex logic into compact representations allows users to quickly and iteratively develop projects that address real-world problems.

We also presented a number of projects that effectively accomplish this mission. We continue to grow the platform to democratize access to newer technologies, preparing future generations for a world in which computational thinking is a central part of problem-solving.

We already observe a rise in the growth of machine learning technologies. These technologies offer new ways of engaging with the world and could dramatically affect the future of technology and society. To support educating youth in this family of technologies, we are actively developing artificial intelligence and machine learning components, as well as curricula teachers can use to instruct students in these technologies.

In the future, we expect that households will be increasingly computationally literate. Already we are observing toddlers making use of devices such as phones and tablets to learn and engage the world in different ways. These technologies will become nearly universal in the near future, mandating increased pedagogy around computational thinking as well as the creation of environments to aid young children in using these tools to solve problems is critical.

We must help them become producers and change makers rather than simply consumers. Increasingly, we move toward a world where functionality is abstracted, or provided as pieces that the computationally literate can combine for novel solutions for any problem.

App Inventor will continue to push these boundaries by exploring bleeding edge technologies and integrating them within a mobile context.

Lastly, we are moving toward economies of knowledge. Tools that provide increased abstraction for solving problems will offer more advantages to individuals than traditional engineering approaches.

The authors would like to thank Prof. Hal Abelson, Karen Lang, and Josh Sheldon for their input, and discussions of material in the manuscript. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Skip to main content Skip to sections. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Authors Authors and affiliations Evan W. Patton Michael Tissenbaum Farzeen Harunani. Open Access. First Online: 03 May Keywords Computational thinking Computational action Educational technology Programming languages Block-based programming Mobile learning.

Download chapter PDF. The MIT App Inventor user interface includes two main editors: the design editor and the blocks editor. The design editor, or designer see Fig. The blocks editor see Fig. In this way, anyone can quickly build a mobile app and immediately begin to iterate and test.

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