Saturday, December 5, 2015

MIT App Inventor

The App Inventor (AI2) platform (Abeywardena, 2015) looks interesting. This is a similar interface to that used for teaching programming to school children and to undergraduates taking computing as a service course.

Australian company, Grok Learning use such a visual programming language (Blockly) for teaching programing to school kids. The similar "Snap!" programming environment is used for UC Berkeley's "Beauty and Joy of Computing" (Harvey, 2012).

However, I am not sure we should be turning every educator into a computer programmer. I think we need something at a higher level of abstraction, which implements educational constructs, rather than programming ones.

Reference

Abeywardena, I. S. (2015). Educational App Development Toolkit for Teachers and Learners. Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/1729/2015_Abeywardena_Educational_App_Dev.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
 
Harvey, B. (2012). The Beauty and Joy of Computing: Computer Science for Everyone. Proceedings of Constructionism 2012, 33-39. http://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/BJC.pdf

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