App Inventor for Android
© 2010 Google, Inc.
Note 3/25/2015. See MIT App Inventor. Perhaps one of the most important educational products of all time, App Inventor for Android (or just "App Inventor") is best described as a visual authoring language (like MIT's Scratch) that makes it possible to program your Android phone. We have not yet tested App Inventor on an Android phone; however, it is possible to get a sense of what it does by watching the demonstration videos at http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/. App Inventor is designed to give you control over inner workings of your smart phone, by way of a building block interface. What's most important, however, the products are real. You don't see too many Scratch products on the App Store list, Apple's SDK (Software Development Kit) costs $100. By comparison, App Inventor is free, easier to use, and it creates real products that could be sold on a growing number of Android-based computing devices. One can easily project a year ahead, when we have an Android-based iPad equivalent to get a sense of the significance of such a tool. Need a quiz for your science class? Program it. Bored on the commute to work? Make yourself a maze game, that uses your phone's tilt sensors and GPS location sensor to open even more possibilities. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you could even have the phone ask the questions aloud. Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are, say to help you remember where you parked your car or show the locations of colleagues at a conference. App Inventor is based on the "Open Blocks" Java library, for creating visual blocks for programming languages, developed at MIT, and also used in Scratch. The compiler that translates the visual blocks language for implementation on Android uses the Kawa Language Framework.
Windows, Mac OSX, Android
Teaches: creativity, programming