Paper Info
Title
Comparing the mobile novice programming environments: App Inventor for Android vs. GameSalad
Abstract
Novice programming environments (NPEs) like Scratch and Alice witnessed tremendous growth in adoption and popularity in recent years. These NPEs have successfully lowered the barrier of initial entry to programming. They have also allowed novice computing students to exercise their creative freedom more meaningfully by enabling them to work on projects which have more real life context. Recent trends in adoption of smartphone and other mobile devices among our youth points to a time in near future when majority of them will be mobile device users. Hence, if the NPEs want to remain relevant among youth, they need to adapt to and cater to a mobile-device centric audience. Google and MIT's App Inventor for Android is one of the early NPEs that is trying to achieve this by offering a Scratch-like environment for mobile apps development. GameSalad is another free software primarily for Mac platform that can also offers a drag-n-drop rule-based environment for creating apps. In this paper we compare these two environments' suitableness for computing introduction. Our comparison is based on several logistical, instructional, and operational factors and points to the fact that both these mobile NPEs have their strong points as well as weaknesses. We believe the effectiveness and success of these mobile NPEs will vary depending on particular situations, and hence our work will aid someone looking for a mobile NPE in making a more judicious choice.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/FIE.2012.6462363
FIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
drag-n-drop rule-based environment,mobile npe,app inventor,novice programming environment,mobile device user,mobile novice programming environment,mobile device,mobile npes,novice computing student,mobile apps development,early npes,scratch-like environment,mobile computing
Mobile computing,World Wide Web,Mobile search,Android (operating system),Popularity,Mobile device,Software,Engineering,Multimedia,Mobile telephony,Humanoid robot
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.45
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Krishnendu Roy1284.94
David B. DeMeritt230.45
William C. Rousse330.45