App Inventor Continues Life at MIT 23
An anonymous reader writes with a press release on the App Inventor Weblog. From the release: "MIT announced the launch of the new Center for Mobile Learning, with a first activity being to take over and refine App Inventor for Android. The center will be led by App Inventor mastermind Hal Abelson, Mitch Resnick of Lego Mindstorms and Scratch fame, and Eric Klopfer, the director of teacher education at MIT and an expert in games and simulation. This news boomerangs the negativity surrounding Google's discontinuation announcement last week. To the many teachers whose curriculums have been energized by App inventor, and to the thousands of newly empowered app builders: Rejoice! The fun has just begun!"
Personally I see this as a great thing. By axing App Inventor as a Google Project and releasing the source there is finally a real world example of using Scheme to write Android applications that others can inspect.
Great News for Teachers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
It would be nice to see.
As long as such a GUI selectively reveals to the user, what the logic of programming is actually like.
Im unity100 (Score:1)
hehehehe
Scheme... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Lol, all I remember is churn when I surfed the Carolinas.
-AI
Re: (Score:1)
How is this news? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Alright, what does this guy really do? (Score:4, Informative)
In reality he is director of the MIT STEP [mit.edu] program, which is a program which teaching MIT students how to teach high school. (No, I'm not kidding.)
The STEP program was actually responsible for developing the graphical programming system (OpenBlocks [mit.edu]) used by App Inventor. OpenBlocks was originally invented for use in the StarLogo TNG [mit.edu] environment, but was deliberately designed to be general and suitable for other block based visual programming languages.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No dumbass, MIT actually has a little known program to make *teachers*, not professors.
http://civic.mit.edu/users/klopfer [mit.edu] http://step.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] http://student.mit.edu/catalog/m11a.html [mit.edu] (11.124-11.130)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I called him a dumbass for conflating teacher and professor,
and then running his mouth off without verifying any of his assumptions first.
The wrong way to open source a product (Score:2)
At least this exercise taught us one thing: The wrong way to transition a product to open source. Google should have made this announcement and the prior "cancellation" announcement one single communication. Instead, they freaked out their community and received a bunch of negative reaction. All the time, they were doing the exact thing we always hope companies will do: release a proprietary product as open source.
Re: (Score:2)
Moby is a limited educational environment that does not expose the full Scheme language and integrates poorly with the rest of the environment (you can't e.g. call Java protocols directly from Scheme... which could be problematic). Kawa, OTOH, compiles to Java bytecode that can be transformed into DEX just like any normal Java. Since it compiles to Java you can directly call of the Android protocols making it actually useful. The only problem is that getting it into the build chain is a bit mystifying at le
The Death of Language. (Score:2)
>curriculums
CURRICULA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8 [youtube.com]
"People called Romans they go the 'ouse?!"
--
BMO
Why is this good for teachers??? (Score:2)