Monday, July 12, 2010

Google's Android App Inventor: App Development for the Rest of Us - based on Open Blocks visual programming

INFORMATION FROM THE GOOGLE APP INVENTOR WEBSITE:



 About App Inventor (info from the Google App Inventor website)
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More info from Google App Inventor:
"In creating App Inventor for Android, we're fortunate to be able to draw upon significant prior research in educational computing, and work done in Google on online development environments.
The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Scheller Teacher Education Program and derives from thesis research by Ricarose Roque. We thank Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program for making Open Blocks available and for their help in working with it. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to the Scratch programming language, a project of the MIT Media Laboratory's Lifelong Kindergarten Group.
The compiler that translates the visual blocks language for implementation on Android uses the Kawa Language Framework and Kawa's dialect of the Scheme programming language, developed by Per Bothner and distributed as part of the Gnu Operating System by the Free Software Foundation.
The educational perspective that motivates App Inventor holds that programming can be a vehicle for engaging powerful ideas through active learning. As such, it is part of an ongoing movement in computers and education that began with the work of Seymour Papert and the MIT Logo Group in the 1960s."

More on this topic later!

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