David Wolber and the University of San Francisco received a $200,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to launch the Democratize Computing Lab at USF . The Lab’s mission is to break down the programmer divide and radically broaden and diversify the pool of software creators.
The App Inventor Gallery is now open to the world at gallery.appinventor.mit.edu. Show off your apps. Find apps for remixing. Learn from others and collaborate! The gallery is an open-source app store, a collaborative development environment, and a peer-to-peer learning studio, all in one. Teachers, students, and app developers: make the gallery part of your app inventing!
Ahh, Denver in March: Sunny and 60 on Thursday, blizzard on Saturday... but we had a blast!
I am happy to report that the 44th annual meeting of the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) was a wonderful success, and that App Inventor was well represented by educators from all over the country.
This past Friday and Saturday, at the MIT Media Lab, I had the honor of welcoming seven educators and App Inventor experts from around the country to the inaugural working group meeting of the MIT App Inventor Training Corps. Joined by other representatives from the MIT App Inventor team and Phil Puthumana of the Verizon Foundation, we gathered to prepare to train the ten Best in Nation winning teams who competed in the Verizon Innovative App Challenge.
Leo Burd and I have recovered from jetlag and are ready to report on our trip to the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 25-28. We went to MWC to represent the MIT Center for Mobile Learning as part of the unX network, a partnership with CSEV, UNED, Telefónica, and Banco Santander that is creating the first learning and entrepreneurship portal for Latin America.
The MWC conference was HUGE! Over 70,000 people attended from all over the world, and representing every branch of industry related to mobile devices.
It's a busy time here for the App Inventor crew! CML staff Shay and Leo are currently in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, presenting on unX. Created through a partnership between MIT, UNED, Santander, Telefónica and CSEV, unX is the first online learning portal (MOOC) specifically created to foster entrepreneurship in Ibero-American countries. Learn More about unX and the Mobile World Conference in this downloadable press release.
If you are running Java 6 on a Macintosh, you should run Apple's latest software update 12 released February 1st. If you have been running Java 7 you may get a notice when opening the Blocks Editor that asks you to update Java. You must run this update to use App Inventor. This issue is due to a vulnerability in Java that affects all users -- not just App Inventor users and not even just Mac users. We will continue to monitor the situation and let you know what else, if anything, you'll need to do.
The 2012 App Inventor Contest had 125 submissions in four categories: K-8, High School, College/University, and Open. Google Nexus 7 Tablets are awarded to the 1st place winners, with App Inventor books given for second place. Participants included students as young as third grade, college students, hobbyists, professional developers, and even some self-described "retired old ladies"!
We are very excited to be able to announce that...
Starting with today’s release of MIT App Inventor, v132, you no longer need a USB cable to connect your phone to your computer. We have added the option to connect the phone to the computer wirelessly. Not only does this avoid the cable, it also eliminates the often tedious process (on Windows) of finding, downloading, and installing drivers specific to your device. Now all you need now is a wireless (WiFi) network that your phone or device and your computer can both access. Read More...
We have great news: the new release of App Inventor is now live, and contains some exciting new functionality. Be sure to read the release notes for the entire list of updates. Here are the highlights:
