Techno Babble

App Inventor allows you to build applications for Android if if you have no experience of programming. Instead of writing code, simply design how you want the application to look and use pre-built blocks to specify the application behaviour.

There are blocks for almost everything you can do on an Android phone as well as specific blocks for doing “programming stuff”.

Watch it in action in the following 60 second video showing an application being made.

The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library ¹ 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 ² 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 ³, a project of the MIT Media Laboratory’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

To find out more about App Inventor go to

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/index.html

Remember Scratch – a drag and drop programming paradigm from MIT?

If not refresh your memory at

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/2007/11/drag-and-drop-programming/

or

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Well, now there’s something else, in a similar vein, Kodu from Microsoft Research. (Based on Boku – here’s a Boku report from March 2007)

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/03/microsoft_resea.html

Kodu is a a visual programming language which has been designed for creating games by children. It runs on the Xbox and uses the game controller for input.

Kodu - Visual Programming

Using a simple language, which is entirely icon-based, programs are broken down into rules which are further divide into conditions and actions.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

There’s a video of an interview with Matthew MacLaurin the man behind Kodu

CES 2009 Matthew MacLaurin on Kodu

Kodu will be available for download from the XBox Live Community Games channel.