In September 2011, I posted about how much I like App Inventor as a tool to get students excited about computer science along with believing that they have the ability to create technology that could potentially change someone’s experience. Since then, I have talked with more computer science educators than I care to admit who mention things about App Inventor like, “my students will find it too babyish”, “the programming isn’t advanced enough”, and “they will get bored quickly.” To them, and to anyone else who might be considering using App Inventor in their CS classes (of all levels), I want to share something that happened this week.
A 9th grade student of mine who is also a member of the Mobile App Development Club I sponsor asked me if I could give him some advice on how he can convince his parents to buy him an Android smartphone. I chuckled as I recalled all of my failed attempts at convincing my own parents to buy me an Atari system, call waiting, or cable TV. (I was lucky enough to get an Apple IIE.) I suggested that if he could show his students that he was building apps for his phone that were useful to someone other than himself, then his parents would understand that he was creating with, and for, technology, not just using the technology. I asked him if he could think of an app that could help his parents in some way. He said he would think about it and walked away. About twenty minutes later, my student returned with a problem that he thought he could help his father with. His father works at a car dealership and often has to walk through the lot to find certain vehicles. The problem: his father is color blind. My student decided that he wanted an app that would enable his father to take a picture of the car he suspected was the right one and then announce the correct color of the car. Brilliant!
So, we went to work. His job: start to sketch the user interface and make a list of the functionalities the app would have. My job: make sure he had learned the appropriate computer science concepts to build this particular app. The concepts I came up with:
1) take a picture with the camera or select a picture from the phone’s gallery
2) get the color of the pixel selected by the user when he/she touches the picture on the screen
3) perform string concatenation
4) initialize a list and fill the list with values
5) create a method that traverses a list using a for loop, find the index number of the minimum value in a list, and then return that value
And that’s just off the top of my head. Now, to address the issue that App Inventor is too elementary, item #5 is very similar to one of the free response prompts that shows up every few years or so on the AP Computer Science exam. Do we think that writing procedures or finding the minimum or maximum in a list is babyish?
At the end of the day, what remains is that this 9th grader created a program to help someone, designed a user interface that was simple but had all of the needed functionality, worked with variables, value-returning methods, lists, for loops, and performed both pixel and string manipulation. Now he’s off to perform user testing, solicit feedback, and refine his program.
The look on my student’s face this week as he was working on a program that will help his Dad was priceless. This experience made me remember why I became a teacher and gave me the much-needed boost I often need during the gray sky season. If the student ends up with an Android phone, that will just be the flower on top of the icing on the cake.
Ria Galanos
CSTA 9-12 Representative
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Alexandria, VA