App inventor for Android with studio-based learning

  • Authors:

  • Paul Gestwicki;Khuloud Ahmad

  • Affiliations:

  • Ball State University, Muncie, IN;Ball State University, Muncie, IN

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

App Inventor for Android allows people with little or no programming experience to create smart phone applications on the Android platform. This is accomplished by using drag-and-drop UI design and blocks-oriented visual programming. We offered an experimental section during the closed beta testing of App Inventor for Android in which we used Studio-Based Learning to foster positive learning experiences. Studio-Based Learning is a pedagogical approach in which students build their own representations of their knowledge and share these, formally and informally, with both experts and peers. Our students worked in teams on several projects, with the sixteen students creating over thirty Android applications while learning fundamentals of Computer Science. In this paper, we provide the background and inspiration for this work, including a review of literature on Studio-Based Learning and a comparison of App Inventor for Android to other modern visual programming environments. An overview of our semester goals and course design are provided. From our experience and based on the literature, we conclude that App Inventor for Android and Studio-Based Learning make for a powerful combination to introduce non-CS majors to concepts of Computer Science-not just programming, but also ideas that tend not to be covered in conventional CS1 courses such as human-computer interaction, incremental and iterative design processes, collaboration, evaluation, and quality assurance. This paper complements the eponymous Web site at https://sites.google.com/site/appinventorsbl.