Sharon Michaels wrote a great review of App Inventor and like many lauds its visual, drag-and-drop interface. In teaching App Inventor for a year, I’ve seen that it does work for non-programmers and I’ve thought a great deal about why. Here are the key features of the language:
No syntax — The blocks language eliminates the need to remember and type code. When I teach beginners textual languages, their biggest pain is syntax, the blank page, and the cryptic error messages that Python/Java/etc. provides for them. Most beginners quit because of the frustrating experience of syntax errors.
Events at the top level — Traditional programming languages were designed when the best metaphor for a program was “a program is like a recipe– a set of instructions”.
Since the advent of the graphical user interface, programs have not been recipes, but sets of event-handlers. “When this happens, the app does this. ” is the correct conceptual model.
With App Inventor, an app is a set of event-handlers. I know this is amazing, but you can say, “when a user clicks this button, ” by dragging out a block. Compare this with Java, which requires you to understand classes, objects, and listeners in order to express an event-handler. Even if App Inventor were a textual language, its 1st order events would dramatically ease the development task.
Choose from a set of options — The components and functions are organized into drawers. You program by finding a block and dragging it into the program. You don’t have to remember how to enter an instruction or refer to a programming manual.
Only some blocks plug-in — Instead of chastising the programmer with cryptic error messages, App Inventor’s blocks language restricts the programmer from making mistakes in the first place. For instance, if a function block expects a certain type of parameter, you aren’t allowed to plug in a different type. This doesn’t eliminate all errors, but it sure helps.
Concreteness — You program components, not abstractions. When you drag out a component, an object is created and function blocks created for it. This is a problem in terms of code reuse and program size, but the concreteness is a boon for beginners and is pretty nice for experts as well.
High-level components — The app inventor team has built a great library with simplicity the main goal. There are months of programming expertise embedded in the components.
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Filed under: what is app inventor? | Tagged: android, app, app inventor, programming | 5 Comments »
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $565,836 grant in support of mobile programming education with App Inventor. Its
