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App Inventor Continues Life at MIT
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.
I used to teach a Lego Mindstorm based after-school program. If this guy can make a GUI on top of LabView that is easy enough for 4rth graders to master, I can't wait to see what he does with the Android SDK/ App Inventor.
"... there is finally a real world example of using Scheme to write Android applications that others can inspect." You mean as long as there aren't any 10-deep or more nested expressions in the code or you've messed around with .emacs files a lot. Otherwise, Scheme becomes rather un-inspectable. I'm having some disturbing flashbacks from my undergrad days as I write this.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
Didn't the "discontinuation" announcement specifically say that they were simply stopping it being a Google branded thing and open sourcing it? Not only that, but they also said they had plans to continue developing it. They were just killing the Google branded part. It was never going away in the first place.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
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.
In reality he is director of the MIT STEP 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) used by App Inventor. OpenBlocks was originally invented for use in the StarLogo TNG environment, but was deliberately designed to be general and suitable for other block based visual programming languages.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
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 least for this Schemer (ant is not really what I would consider intuitive). Java protocols also tend to not fit very cleanly into traditional Scheme program structure.
My hope is that the App Inventor source will have good examples of using the Android protocols in a Schemey style and especially how to sanely build programs with the Kawa library.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
No dumbass, MIT actually has a little known program to make *teachers*, not professors.
http://civic.mit.edu/users/klopfer http://step.mit.edu/ http://student.mit.edu/catalog/m11a.html (11.124-11.130)
Were that I say, pancakes?
>curriculums
CURRICULA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8
"People called Romans they go the 'ouse?!"
--
BMO
It's a bit harsh, calling someone "dumbass" for not knowing something that's little known.
it's a bit dumbass to not realise that "little known" was an instance of this new and never-before-seen thing called sarcasm.
what exactly are they going to teach? That software development and programming is as easy as dragging widgets on a screen and that you really dont need to know how to write code or even understand how everything works?
Actually, I called him a dumbass for conflating teacher and professor,
and then running his mouth off without verifying any of his assumptions first.
Were that I say, pancakes?