Archive for September, 2010
App Inventor – Intro
Posted by irislapinski on September 20th, 2010
(Written by Dan)
This is the first in a series we’re going to do on Google’s App Inventor tool.
App inventor is a tool to make, play even, at making Android mobile phone apps, learning programming concepts along the way.
Primarily at those new to programming, specifically in education. Google developed AI with a very small group of US educators. This summer the tool entered public beta, leading to an influx of interest from around the world.
In our first course we used paper prototyping to develop low fidelity concepts. App Inventor is not a replacement for this, but rather an additional tool to use together with idea generation and paper planning.
Visual editor - The isn’t exactly what-you-see-is-what-you-get, you allows you to place components you’d like to use in your app visually, and edit their properties. (This view is roughly equivalent to Interface builder for iPhone development.)
Blocks editor – Once you’ve placed your components and have a good idea how what the app is going to do, this view allows you to connect up the guts of the app. This view is based on the open-source visual programming project Scratch. Using the blocks editor, students learn visually about programming concepts such as variables, algebraic maths, lists, flow control, and event hooks.
We’ll be writing up more on App Inventor as we use it ourselves, and with in our courses.
Sample apps & tutorials
There doesn’t appear to be a comprehensive list of AI sample apps and tutorials, so we’ve made one. We’ll been keeping it up to date with different resources we find – if you have one to add, please let us know!
CGFS – Launch event
Posted by irislapinski on September 16th, 2010
The girls recieving their loaned Dell Streaks
We blogged previously about partnering with CGFS as our second centre, and running a afternoon course in their school.
The launch event for the course happened this week, where invited guests heard some of the highlights of the first course, how the course would work in a school, as well as hearing from some of the girls taking part themselves.
Here are some photos from the event;
App design workshop for OSI in Latvia
Posted by irislapinski on September 1st, 2010
As a guest blogger our educator Satwant Singh Kenth reports about his epxerience of running an app design workshop for the Open Society Institute in Latvia:
” I was recently hired by CDI Europe as an educator after successfully completing the first ever Apps for Good course where I helped to create the App “Stop and Search”. Since then I had been training as an educator and was told that I was to run my first ever app workshop…in Latvia! An exciting opportunity but also slightly unnerving since I had never been to Latvia and wasn’t sure what to expect.
I was also told I wouldn’t be alone as Iris Lapinski (Head of CDI Europe and also my boss – more pressure!) would be sharing the responsibility of the two workshops each 60 minutes long.
The workshops were part of the Youth in the 21st Century: Debating and Producing Media held in Latvia with roughly 30 students ranging from 18-25 years. Our original goal was to try put the students in a position where they could take their existing project ideas they had been working on and turn them into potential app ideas. However, we soon realised another goal needed to be achieved first: give them basic knowledge about apps. Since smartphones hadn’t fully penetrated Latvia, the potential and relevance of apps were not fully understood by the students.
So our presentation involved showing the relevance of mobile phones and apps to journalism as a powerful new media that could be used to spread a message and unite people. We went on to talk about the functions of apps, the evolution of phones, the critical thinking skills that are needed when creating apps.
These new skills were then applied to their journalism ideas. They looked at Zolmo’s award-winning Jamie Oliver app wireframes to get inspiration for how their journalism ideas could be transferred into mobile apps. You can see the full presentation we gave here:
And here are the ideas the teams came up with:
PackBag
Helping you to maximise the space of your suitcase when you are packing for travelling. Taking into account duration, location and what the size your suitcase is, as well as whether you are male or female. Obviously, the reason behind this was that the students believed a particular gender wastes more space packing shoes then the other… I’ll let you guess which gender…
- PackBag wireframe
Track a Forest
In Latvia Illegal lumbering takes place and has become quite an issue, so this app aims to help people know whether they are in an area where chopping trees is illegal or legal by using the geo-location on your phone. It should also allow you to report illegal lumbering to your local authority. I think this is a great idea that could really help the government and the community work together to solve a big issue in Latvia.
- Track a Forest wireframe
Other ideas included:
- an app that aims to increase the safety of picking up hitchhikers (hitchhiking is very popular in Latvia)
- an idea to help test the temperature of water (hmm for that phones first need to get waterproof, so that’s certainly some time away)
- an app that helps you know the danger of animals and ways to tame them
- an idea to help the students of the OSI to share their photos and experiences of a boat trip they took.
All in all, it was a great learning experience for both the students – learning about how smartphones, apps and journalism were ultimately not so far apart – and for me – learning about how mobile apps and mobile technology wasn’t as wide spread in other countries as I had previously thought.”