For the first week back from half-term, the entire school is off timetable and students got to choose 2 and 3 day sessions that each teacher had proposed themselves. I’ll probably add another post on this idea as it has been great so far. One of my sessions I proposed was creating mobile phone apps with App Inventor for Android.
App Inventor Main Interface
Firstly and foremost, what an excellent piece of software. When I first came across it – a good time after owning a phone and becoming a teacher – I literally couldn’t believe that it existed and I hadn’t heard of it. I’m sure the much-repressed developer in me would probably turn its nose up at a GUI interface for producing software but the educator in me thinks it’s amazing. For literally anyone to be able to drag a few components onto the screen and to convert to an .apk which can be loaded onto a phone is a million miles away from the usual developer-far to produce a binary. For comparison, it’s almost identical to Scratch except it’s for general phone apps not just games and it has a built-in phone emulator (it’s no great surprise that MIT have appropriated the newly open-sourced App Inventor).
Starting from the beginning, the setup was less than hassle-free I must admit. School computer systems are notoriously locked down and even after the required software was installed I ran into problems. It seems a good point to explain the components of the software: there’s a website for the GUI, a java app for the blocks editor (code) and an installed .exe for the phone emulator. The problem came with the firewall blocking the blocks editor talking to the emulator. It was eventually resolved but we did suffer from random crashes, no fault of the software I would imagine, but just something to bear in mind and plan for next time.
Once it was up and running though, the students were quick to engage with the GUI part of draggning components onto the screen, and the emulator loading the app onto a phone was a real ‘wow’ moment for them.
Emulator
The rest of the session was very similar to how a Scratch lesson goes in terms of pros and cons.
- The students were good at using tutorials to adapt into their ideas
- The students have over-ambitious ideas so it’s important to say what can and can’t be done.
- They ask a lot of questions so you need to be fairly proficient in the software
- The students struggle with the code part (no suprise) but most get the general idea suprisingly quick and just need correction to keep on the right track
- Getting their software onto a real phone is really rewarding (again permission problems prevented this going completely smoothly)
- There’s no way of creating more than one screen (one of most common questions), it can be done with showing and hiding ScreenArrangements but it’s not ideal
Despite the technical hiccups and teething problems, I thought it was an excellent session and I’d definitely do it again with a bit more structure around it, knowing everything would work slightly better next time! Underneath are a few examples of the apps they made, bear in mind, they were done in around 2 hours!
