Group items tagged

Blockly is a web-based, graphical programming language. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required.

Scratch / App Inventor like coding

The two teachers, Betsy and Chinma, have been working together to create a course curriculum that will be implemented in their high school classrooms. Our goal is to expose high students (i.e. CS zero students) to Computer Science using App Inventor. The App Inventor curriculum should excite the students and therefore encourage them to continue studying Computer Science. We hope that this curriculum will become the catalyst that spurs students to attend college and major in Computer Science.

"This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0940932. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."

This page was created as a source for all things AppInventor.

Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America?

Doug, thank you for the link to the article. I just spent a few days in Boston with CS Educators at the App Inventor Summit and the issues discussed in this article now make more sense to me. The CS Principles project (csprinciples.org) looks like a huge step in the right direction. It "could" become the foundation of introductory CS courses in high school (AP) and in post-secondary. They have run 2 years of pilot courses and it looks promising. The next generation AP exam will likely be language agnostic - designs will likely be expressed in pseudocode and the course really engages with students (not just programming).

A possible solution to use the Text to Speech component in the emulator...