Google App Inventor released as MIT App Inventor; looking for help (coders, UI experts, education experts)

[Nils Hitze]

Dear global GTUG managers and Boston GTUG members:

As you may have seen in the news, Google's hand-over of App Inventor to MIT is now complete (after the code was ported to run on generic cloud technologies rather than Google-internal APIs). Google App Inventor is open again to the world as MIT App Inventor:

http://appinventor.mit.edu/

http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/

Hal Abelson at MIT has asked if anyone in the GTUG community may be interested in collaborating on this project. I have a meeting scheduled with Hal soon in Boston, but even if you're not in Boston, there are a lot of areas that MIT could use help, from frontend and backend development, to coming up with better models for visual/graphical computing (e.g. figuring out what the right level of abstraction of the blocks should be, and how they should fit together), to the pedagogical issues (figuring out better ways of using tools like App Inventor to teach programming, and figuring out how to modify App Inventor to make programming and app design easier to learn).

Personally I think there is a huge opportunity here to develop a much better model of visual computing than currently exists, i.e. moving above the level of plugging together Lego bricks, where one brick corresponds to one Java keyword, to a higher level that expresses the program concisely but much more naturally and less rigidly. App Inventor is a good starting point to build something like that on top of.

Please reply to me off-list if you are interested in getting involved, either remotely or in-person in Boston. Please also pass on to your own GTUG mailing lists if you are a GTUG manager and if you think there would be interest among your members in helping out.

Thank you,

Luke Hutchison

Boston GTUG co-organizer

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hal Abelson

Hi Luke,

I saw the announcement of the Android Dev camp and it made we wonder if you or folks in GYUG knew about App Inventor, which is our blocks-based IDE aimed at letting kids and non-programmers create Android apps.   App Inventor is housed in the Media Lab at the Center for Mobile Learning.  We're about to open our cloud-based development system to the world.  You can see a tiny bit of info at appinventoredu.mit.edu.

I'm wondering if there are Android savvy folks in GTUG who might like to work with us on extending the platform, or serving as advisors on how to do various Android internal things.

Any interest here?

==Hal