Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

7.14.10 | Google has just made it incredibly easy for students—and everyone else—to jump from being digital media consumers to digital media creators. It just launched App Inventor, which creates an extremely user-friendly interface for creating applications for the Android mobile operating system.

What’s extra-remarkable is that Google’s rationale for App Inventor seems to be primarily educational—as a way to open up computer programming to students who wouldn’t have considered it in the past.

Steve Lohr at The New York Times writes: “User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.”

Google engineer Mark Friedman, writing on the company’s official blog, touts the App Inventor’s classroom potential:

For the past year, we’ve been testing App Inventor in classrooms around the United States, and we’ve found that it opens up the world of computer programming to students in new and powerful ways. David Wolber, professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco and part of the initial pilot program, says “students traditionally intimidated by technology are motivated and excited to program with App Inventor.” One student from Professor Wolber’s class told us: “I used to think that no one could program except CS people. Now, I’ve made dozens of applications for the Android phone!” Another student, who struggles with dyslexia, was inspired by App Inventor to take more computer science classes and is now learning Python.

The post links to a video showing App Inventor “in the field” at University of San Francisco.

MIT computer scientist Harold Abelson, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project, explained to the Times how App Inventor works and what students have done with it:

The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different smartphone capabilities — and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. The result is an application on that person’s smartphone.

For example, one student made a program to inform a selected list of friends, with a short text message, where he was every 15 minutes. The program was created by putting three graphic code blocks together: one block showed the phone’s location sensor, another showed a clock (which he set for 15-minute intervals), and third linked to a simple database on a Web site, listing the selected friends.

An onscreen button would turn on the program, Abelson explained, for perhaps a few hours on a Saturday night when the person wanted his friends to know where he was.

A student at the University of San Francisco, Mr. Abelson said, made a program that automatically replied to text messages, when he was driving. “Please don’t send me text messages,” it read. “I’m driving.” [...]

“These aren’t the slickest applications in the world,” Mr. Abelson said. “But they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.”

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb ruminates about how cool it all is—and how it reveals how Google’s open-source, DIY philosophy is a much better fit for education than Apple’s increasing insular ecosystem: “Instead of locking down its App Market, barring entry to anyone but those who know how to code in the languages it specifies, Google is embracing ‘openness,’ saying anyone with an idea is welcome here.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW, though still have “5 Big Questions” concerning App Inventor—even though his enthusiasm is clearly evident.

See the App Inventor for yourself:

Related: For more watch Spotlight’s interview with Leshell Hatley: Media Makers: Training Tomorrow’s Computer Scientists at Youth AppLab.