Cloud Object Storage | Store & Retrieve Data Anywhere ...



Video ScriptINTROEverybody has a mobile phone these days - most students do.What if we saw these devices as tools for learning, instead of distractions? Might it stimulate your students’ curiosity and desire to learn?Today we will explore a platform called the MIT App Inventor. It allows anyone with a laptop and Internet connection to easily build mobile apps in Android.App Inventor was started by professors and students at MIT to democratise software development. It is a visual coding language using blocks you can drag and drop to build a program like a puzzle.In this video I am going to explain why it is beneficial to integrate app development in your classroom, and how your students can easily create their own apps with App Inventor.All you need to get started is:(1) a laptop with an up-to-date browser (such as Chrome or Firefox)(3) an Android mobile device with the MIT App Inventor app (downloaded from the Google Play Store)(3) and a Wi-Fi hotspot to connect both laptop and mobile deviceDo you want to know how to create your first app? Keep watching!STEP BY STEP PROCESS TO CREATE AN APPLet’s get started with creating our first mobile app, called “Hello World!” You will create a button that says “Hello World!” every time you click on it. You will first need to go to the App Inventor website () and click on the Create button on the upper right-hand side of the screen. You then need to log-in with your Gmail account and password, and type in the project name HelloWorld with no spaces.We then get to the Designer editor. This is where we will design the look of our app. On the left-hand side of the screen is the “Palette”. This contains components we can add to our app by simply dragging the items into the mobile screen in the centre of the Designer. From the “User Interface” drawer we take the component “Button” and drag it into the mobile screen called Viewer.These components have adjustable properties. To view and change the Properties of a component, you must first select the desired component on the list of Components. We will now change the button’s text property to “Hello World!”.Let’s now connect our phone to App Inventor by downloading the MIT App Inventor app from the Google Play Store. Once it is downloaded, open the app. On your laptop browser, go to the Connect tab, and select AI companion. A QR code will appear on your screen. Take your phone with the App Inventor app open, and click on the blue button “Scan QR code”. Once you have done this, you should be able to see the “Hello World!” button on your mobile phone. From now on all changes made on your browser will be seen on your mobile phone. This is a great way to test our app instantly, while we are designing and building it.We will now add another component to the screen. On the Palette, from the “Media” drawer, drag the “Text-to-Speech” component into the mobile screen on the Viewer. This is a non-visible component, which should then appear below the screen.Let’s move to the Blocks editor to program the behaviour – create a functionality – for the components we selected in the Designer editor. Click on the “Blocks” button on the upper-right hand-side corner of the browser.In the Blocks editor, there are built-in blocks that handle things like maths, logic and text. Below that are the component blocks that correspond to the components you added in the Designer editor. The white empty space “viewer” is the workspace where all the blocks will be assembled.Click on Button1 component, then click and hold the “when Button1.Click do” event block. Drag it over to the Viewer and drop it there. Next, click on the TextToSpeech drawer. Click and hold the “call TextToSpeech1.speak” block, and drag it over to the Viewer inside the Button1.Click block. This will make the phone speak when the button on the app is clicked.Now you need to tell the TextToSpeech.Speak block what to say. Click on the Text drawer, drag out a text block and plug it into the socket labelled "message". Click on the text block and type in "Hello World." Now test it out. Go to your connected Android device and click on the button. Make sure your volume is up. You should now hear the phone say “Hello World!”.Congratulations! Now you have created your first mobile app! PRACTICAL EXAMPLESRegardless of the subject you teach, you can easily integrate app development into your class. You can for example ask your students to create an app to collect information when out on a school field trip, or an app to help them revise for a history test, or even to create a game that highlights a newly learned mathematical concept. Everything you may think about is possible, so wait no more and start implementing app development in your classroom!BENEFITS FOR STUDENTSBy creating mobile applications your students will learn about how computers store, retrieve and process information and to develop their creativity and problem-solving skills. Moreover, they will learn to feel comfortable with uncertainty and with the feeling of not knowing. App Inventor is a very powerful platform. You can build sophisticated apps with your students: games, educational software (such as quiz apps, or information-gathering apps), location-aware apps (using the GPS-location sensor of the device), or even high-tech apps that can talk and listen, SMS texting apps, apps that control robots (for a Lego robot) and Web-enabled apps (to communicate with other apps such as Twitter).PARTICIPATE IN CODE WEEKNow that you know how to create a mobile app, why not try it out with your students? Think about a possible activity you can do with your students and add it to the Code Week map, where more and more teachers are registering activities to “help bring coding to schools”. Have fun creating your own apps with your students and sharing them with your family and friends! ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download