The perfect app building companion
App Inventor was used in the summer program BAYCAT–The Bay View- Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology in San Francisco. In just a few weeks, these students learned the basics of app building and created a game. One is a fashion app where you can drag clothes into a virtual closet. Another lets you grab for dollars before the police officer snatches you. Another lets you skateboard while boulders fall from the sky, while two others are fun soccer games. The students learned some complex programming, with if-else blocks, timer events, and the like, and they also had to work with Photoshop and other tools to build their user interfaces. Impressive work!
Congrats to the students and to their wonderful volunteer instructor, USF grad student Roderick Lisam.
Filed under: students, success stories, teaching | Tagged: android, app inventor, apps | 2 Comments »
Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab
Youth Radio is an Oakland, CA organization which promotes young people’s intellectual, creative, and professional growth through education and access to media. They’ve won a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award and now they’re adding mobile apps to their game and and using App Inventor to make it happen.
Here’s a clip about them:
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USF Student-Teachers at the Technovation Pitch-Night
No women in computer science? Not so fast! The University of San Francisco’s App Inventor class is helping to encourage more women into the field. These four students, recent A-listers in the USF course, are now helping high school girls learn programming and entrepreneurship in Iridescent’s Technovation Challenge. Jenny Horowitz, Paige Carrington, Julie Cahill, and Melanie Garcia– Way to go!
For more info about the Tech Challenge, check out this PC World article
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How do we get more women in computer science? App Inventor may be part of the answer.
This year’s Iridescent Technovation Challenge has expanded to NYC and Socal along with the Bay area. This is a program where high school girls spend two nights a week learning app development and entrepreneurship, aided by college students and young professionals. NYC’s program was featured in a PC Magazine article. Three USF students– Jenny Horowitz, Julia Cahill, and Melody Garcia– are instructors at the San Francisco Challenge taking place at Google’s SF offices.
Girls at the NYC Technovation Challenge
The nation-wide finals are May 21 in the Bay Area. I’ll be there!
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App Inventor Director Mark Friedman gave a great keynote talk at USF’s CS Night.
Our CS 107 students– non-cs majors with no prior programming experience– presented and demo’d their Android app projects alongside the seniors and MS students.
CS 107 students Jose Malave and Crystal Ferguson show their app
CS 107 student and filmmaker Angelo Taylor
CS 107 student Angelo Taylor documented the night with this short film, and librarian supreme Shawn Calhoun contributed these photos
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Clive Thompson of Wired Magazine featured a USF student project in his article, 
Coding for the Masses. The article features Daniel Finnegan and his No Text While Driving app.
You can check out a refined version of the app as a tutorial on the App Inventor site, and check out a screencast of how to build it on my App Inventor youtube list.
Filed under: success stories, teaching, texting | Tagged: android, app inventor, creativity | 2 Comments »
How many great ideas get left as just that, some jotted down notes on a dirty napkin in an even dirtier bar? Especially with software and mobile app ideas, most get dropped with, “if we only knew a programmer.”
App Inventor changes things by lowering the barrier to app development– just about anyone, with little or no training, can take an idea and build a working Android prototype for it. Even if it’s not the most refined, complete, or beautiful app, an interactive app can convey an app idea better than a power-point presentation or dirty napkin.
USF Student Daniel Finnegan in the App Inventor class. Photo by Shawn Calhoun (http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawncalhoun/4622481338/in/set-72157623971497647/)
Here’s an example. Daniel Finnegan was a student in my App Inventor class last spring. Daniel is a really sharp, creative guy, a creative writing major who I’m sure spends more time thinking about the human condition than cell phone apps. But with a few hours focusing on app development he came up with a great idea. He had read about the dangers of texting while driving– incredibly, something like 28% of accidents involve a phone. For his final project, he came up with an app that tries to help by eliminating your urge to text back. The app, which Daniel coined, “No Text While Driving,” auto-responds to any arriving text with a response message such as, “I’m driving right now, I’ll text you back later.” You turn it on when you start your drive and all your friends and colleagues know why you’re not there for them. The app even lets the user change the response for different situations—say if you’re going into a meeting or a movie– and we’ve written versions that speak texts aloud and even send the driver’s current location as part of the auto-response.
Daniel’s idea struck a chord with people and when App Inventor launched in July, Daniel’s app was cited on the App Inventor About page. Because the app was also a nice example of the powerful Android features you can program with App Inventor, I also developed it as a tutorial for the App Inventor site, and created a YouTube screencast on how to build it.
A few days ago, we were excited to see that State Farm Insurance had launched “On the Move”, an Android app that is quite similar to “No Text While Driving”. State Farm distributes it free to anyone as part of State Farm’s updated Pocket Agent® for Android™ application.
Daniel Finnegan's "No Text While Driving" app
“It is our hope that this widget will prevent crashes and save lives,” said Laurette Stiles, Strategic Resources vice president at State Farm. “This new service will help drivers manage the temptation to read or respond to text messages when they are behind the wheel. We wanted to make this widget available free-of-charge as just one of the ways we’re working to keep our roadways safe for drivers.”
I don’t know that the State Farm app was inspired by “No Text While Driving”, but its quite possible. In pondering this, I realized the incredible nature of it–an app created in an introductory computer science course, by an English major who had never programmed a computer, possibly being the inspiration for a now mass-produced piece of software! And one that saves lives! As soon as I finish this blog, I have to email USF President Stephen Privett!
If Daniel had written a term paper on his idea, I wouldn’t be blogging about it possibly being the inspiration for the State Farm app. But because App Inventor made it possible for Daniel to transform his idea into something tangible–well, virtual– an interactive app, it is a distinct possibility.
So cheers to Daniel, and to the App Inventor team– you have built a tool that opens up app development to a huge new pool of creative people!
Filed under: students, success stories, what is app inventor? | Tagged: android, app, app inventor, creativity, driving, ideas, texting | 36 Comments »
App Inventor Blog 