Title
Using app inventor in a K-12 summer camp
Abstract
Educators are often seeking new ways to motivate or inspire students to learn. Our past efforts in K-12 outreach included robotics and media computation as the contexts for teaching Computer Science (CS). With the deep interest in mobile technologies among teenagers, our recent outreach has focused on using smartphones as a new context. This paper is an experience report describing our approach and observations from teaching a summer camp for high school students using App Inventor (AI). The paper describes two separate methods (one using a visual block language, and another using Java) that were taught to high school students as a way to create Android applications. We observed that initiating the instruction with the block language, and then showing the direct mapping to an equivalent Java version, assisted students in understanding app development in Java. Our evaluation of the camp includes observations of student work and artifact assessment of student projects. Although the assessment suggests the camp was successful in several areas, we present numerous lessons learned based on our own reflection on the camp content and instruction.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2445196.2445377
SIGCSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
block language,high school student,k-12 summer camp,k-12 outreach,equivalent java version,camp content,recent outreach,new context,new way,artifact assessment,app inventor,summer camp
Mobile technology,Android (operating system),Computer science,Outreach,Artificial intelligence,Java,Multimedia,Robotics
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
0.81
8
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amber Wagner1243.44
Jeff Gray2973116.57
Jonathan Corley3314.15
David Wolber421030.66