App Inventor programmers have been working side-by-side in the cloud together, but they might as well have been using stand-alone software as they couldn’t share their experience. I’m pleased to announce that the App Inventor app gallery is officially launched as part of MIT App Inventor. Students and developers can now easily share their apps and code blocks and learn from each other. The gallery turns App Inventor into a shared learning community similar to the one which has been so successful in Scratch. Now all the students, teachers, and developers who were blindly rubbing virtual shoulders can share their apps in a great, collaborative open-source environment.
Click on any app to open it and see its blocks
The gallery was developed by our team in the Democratize Computing Lab (DCL) at the University of San Francisco (the same team that brings you appinventor.org and this blog), working in collaboration with the MIT App Inventor team. Special thanks go to lead developers Bin Lu and Vincent Zhang of USF, as well as mastermind Jeff Schiller of MIT, all of whom put in a long and concerted effort in making the gallery a reality.
The Democratize Computing Lab is generously funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation.
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.
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.
App Inventor Blog 