Using App Inventor 2 in A Summer Programming

Workshop: Improvements Over Previous Years

Sharefah A. A-Ghamdi1, Noha A. Al-Rajhi2, Nouf M. Al-Onaizy3 and Hend S. Al-Khalifa4
Information Technology Department
College of Computer and Information Sciences
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
{1sharefah|4hendk@ksu.edu.sa}, {2noha.a.alrajhi| 3nouf.alonaizy@gmail.com}

Abstract—App Inventor (AI) for Android is a block-
based programming environment that enables nonprogrammers
to create fully functional mobile applications for Android phones
by dragging and dropping code blocks. Since the launch of AI,
many improvements were applied to it, which aimed to increase
its effectiveness in promoting programming education for
beginners. In our workshop, which targeted high school female
students, we taught mobile programming using the improved
version of AI2 (a free cloud-based tool). Thus, in this paper, we
will describe our experience in using AI2 in our workshop, how it
helped in our teaching method and discuss the improvements and
limitations we observed over the previous version of the tool. We
will also show the activities provided to the students and the
mobile apps that were created using AI2. The final apps as well
as the survey results showed how effective was the workshop and
how the improved version of AI has enhanced the teaching
process.
Keywords—App Inventor 2; Programming; Mobile App;
summer workshop; Learning Improvement
I. INTRODUCTION
Many of recent research have shown that teaching
programming in simple methods and providing concepts in
progressive procedure motivate students to both programming
and computer science fields. Using block-based programming
environments such as App Inventor (AI) for beginners,
simplify the understanding of many programming concepts.
Since AI relies on clicks, and drag and drop, it does not require
writing code, which may cause students frustration with simple
errors such as forgetting a comma (,).
Lately, block-based programming was the approach for
many summer workshops e.g. [1] [2] as well as schools e.g. [3]
and universities e.g. [4]. All of these workshops and courses
taught programming using AI. Such workshops were not only
limited to students, but were extended to include also teachers
either in the field of computer science or others e.g. [5].
In 2013, MIT released App Inventor 2 (AI2) and since then
many changes and improvements happened to this version.
They made it attractive to a wide range of audiences like
educators, designers, researchers and hobbyists [6]. In
comparison with other block-based environments like Scratch,
App Inventor looks more powerful for beginners through
building mobile applications that can make the students more
motivated about programming [7].
In our workshop, which targeted high and middle school
female students, we taught mobile programming using the
improved version of AI (AI2). Thus, in this paper, we will
describe our experience in using AI2 in our workshop, how it
helped in our teaching method and discuss the improvements
and limitations we observed of AI2 over its previous version.
We will also show the activities provided to the students and
the ideas of mobile apps created using AI2. The final mobile
apps as well as the survey results showed how effective was
the workshop and how the improved version of AI has
enhanced the teaching process.
Our contribution in this paper is in two-folds: (1) reporting
our experience in conducting a mobile applications
development workshop for young female students, and (2)
providing insights into AI2 and its improvements and
limitations over its previous version.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2
summarizes some previous work in using AI for programming
education. Section 3 presents our workshop logistics, design
and AI2 improvements. Section 4 discusses our evaluation and
lessons learned from using AI2 and the students' final projects
as well as the results of the pre and post workshop survey.
Finally, section 5 concludes the paper with our future outlook.
II. RELATED WORK
In this section we will focus on previous workshops that
utilized AI as a medium for teaching programming. The reason
behind this approach is to understand the different ways such
workshops used AI in teaching. While searching popular
databases such as ACM, IEEE and Sciencedirect, we found
around 21 papers that are using AI for teaching programming.
Table 1 summarizes these previous experiences which will help
us in shaping our workshop objectives.
From table 1 we can observe diversity in previous
experiences in terms of learning period lengths or in terms of
teaching methodologies. Learning periods ranged from two
semesters such as [9], up to 3 weeks e.g. [10] to one week or
several days e.g. [1] [11], or even one day e.g. [12]. This
diversity in workshop length affected the content of the
delivered curriculum. We found exploratory courses that

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provided group discussion followed by exercises to develop
mobile apps e.g. [12]. On the other hand, introductory courses
to programming e.g. [1] [3] [10] have provided most of the
programming concepts in one week, while courses that
introduced more advanced topics were covered in one semester
or a complete year. We also observed that most of university or
school courses have divided participates into groups. The way
of using AI in each workshop was effected by its objectives for
example: [11] aimed to reach early age students by introducing
them to computing and mobile apps through developing AI
apps during the workshop.
From our previous survey, we observed two things: (1) the
recurring concepts that are usually taught in AI workshops and
(2) the lack of experience repots with AI2, therefore, in our
workshop, we utilize AI2 as a medium for teaching
programming concepts and highlight its improvements which
helped us in enhancing our workshop curriculum.
III. WORKSHOP LOGISTICS
Our summer programming workshop was run by two
Information technology graduates, supervised by an IT faculty
member. The workshop students were recruited through social
advertising to encourage female aged between fifteen and

TABLE 1. SUMMARY OF PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES IN USING AI FOR TEACHING PROGRAMMING

Target
Ref Context Period Workshop Content
Audience
- Event handlers.
- Functions
- Video and sound using high-level components.
Taught AI in One
[4] College student - Abstract thinking, logic and traditional programming skills, e.g., variables, list, etc.
college course semester
- Persistent data
- Accessing APIs,
- Multi-user apps.
Five video tutorials provided to introduce 10 programming Concepts, which are:
- Sequence
- Event-driven programming
- Boolean values
Summer camp - Random number
High school
[1] workshop One week - if-then-else
students
- Boolean conditions
- Variables
- Initialization and increment of variables
- Datatype conversion
- Procedures/methods

- Introduction to AI environment and how to to use its various components whether

simple such as buttons, labels and sounds, or advanced like canvas components for
Second grade of
High school drawing, event handlers that take arguments, arrangement components for controlling
[3] 6 hours senior high
course screen layout, etc.
school
- Introduction to Global variables and development of computational skills in problem
solving by giving students a chance to create mobile app of their own choice.

App inventor was one of many different tools used in this course. It was introduced as one of
High school 14 to 16-year-
[9] One year 12 topics and used to develop the following computational thinking concepts: sequence,
course old students
event, event handler, conditional, parallelism and loop.

The 3rd week of the camp taught the students how to develop an Android app and focused
on concepts such as:
- Objects
- Programming environments (Block Language and Java)
3 Weeks
- Events
Summer camp (3rd week High school
[10] - Decision statements
workshop focused on students
- Loops
AI)
- Methods
- Understand how to read documentation
- Create GUI and code its component
- Use phone sensor components and services (camera, text messaging)

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 - Variables
Workshop on - User input
incorporating - Conditional Branching, Boolean Expressions
K-12 Teachers
[11] mobile One week - Loops
technology into - Procedures (Methods and Functions)
classrooms - Advanced Boolean and Lists
- Components available with an Android device.

The workshop was provided through a group discussion and questions emerging from three
introductory AI collaborative programming exercises (android apps) which introduce
Exploratory Middle school
[12] One day students to simple programming concepts such as: counter, variables, conditional statements
workshop students
and if-then checks, image clicked using the phone camera as well as the use of the
TextToSpeech command.

eighteen to join our workshop. The workshop aimed to
introduce some of the main programming concepts in an
interactive way using AI2. The programming concepts that
were presented are: Variables and methods, Lists, If statement,
Loops and Databases. The concept of Database was presented
in this year’s workshop as an improvement over our previous
workshop [8] also most of the previously surveyed workshops
have taught this concept e.g. [1][3][10], which encouraged us
to offer it.
Next, we will discuss our workshop rationale and
objectives, its presented topics and activities and the new
improvements of AI2.
A. Rationale
Three objectives drove our workshop design, namely:
1) Market demand for mobile applications' developers:
according to 2015 statistics [13] the use of smart phones
will be 32.63% higher than it was in 2014. Also, the
usage of smartphones will become even higher in the
next few years.
2) Easiness of Block based programming environment: In
order to make programming concepts easier to
understand, we decided to use block based programming
environments that helped attract students who might not
otherwise be interested in a pure computing workshop.
3) Apply active Learning: In our workshop, we wanted a
comfortable workshop environment where students are
free to move, talk to each other, and make some activity
together, as cooperative learning. We also wanted to
make the time, material, and tools suitable for students
from a variety of backgrounds and interests by including
events and activities to understand concepts rather than
theoretically explaining them.
B. Topics and Activities
The workshop was a mixture of technical, informational
and social activities meant to deliver programming concepts in
an enjoyable way. At the beginning of the workshop, the
students were divided into four groups; each contains four
students with different ages. The workshop started with some
ice-breaking activities, and then sessions commenced. Our
sessions throughout the 6-days program followed this strategy:
Each day started with an activity that leads students to
understand the concepts presented at that day. Then, the
concepts were briefly described to them by providing their
definition, types -if any - , and when to use them. After that, in
each day there were a mobile application with an idea related to
the concept, each student should implement it using AI2. Table
2 shows the discussed mobile applications' ideas.
TABLE 2. MOBILE APPS BUILT FOR EACH PROGRAMMING CONCEPT
Concept Mobile Application
Variables and methods Screen Background Color.
Lists Purchases List.
If statement Traffic Light.
Loops Odd Numbers.
Databases Value Guessing Game.
In a nutshell the main activities and mobile apps covered in
each day were as follows:
First Day: we spent it describing AI2 interface.
Second Day: we explained variables and methods by applying
active learning techniques. We used boxes and accessories as
an activity, each box accepts specific type of accessory where
the boxes are “variables” and accessories are “values”, then the
final result should be to create a bunch after filling the boxes.
After introducing the students to how to use AI2 to apply
variables and methods in programming, each student developed
a “Screen Background Color” app that contains a button when
clicked it changes the background of the screen.
Third Day: we initially introduced the “lists” concept by
applying "Searching for The Treasure" activity. This activity
started with an initial hint that leads to another hint until the
treasure was found. The mobile app that the students developed
was “Purchases List app”, where a user enters his purchases list
item by item, then displays the purchases as a list by clicking a
display button. We also presented canvas and graphics topics
by the end of the day.
Fourth Day: we presented two concepts, (1) “IF statements”
and (2) “Loops”. The IF statement concept started with
“Feather Colors” activity, where we gave each group three oil
colors with written instructions to follow while color mixing.
The instructions were written using if statements to specify
what color they will get if they mix two specific colors. Then
students built the “Traffic Light” mobile app, which change the

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current traffic light color depending on the previous color when TABLE 3. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN APP INVENTOR VERSIONS 1 (AI)
a user clicks the button. On the other hand, the Loops concept AND 2 (AI2).
started with a discussion activity explaining the loop concept
AI1 AI2 Comments
via some real world examples such as water cycle and blood
cycle. After that “Searching for the odd numbers” mobile app Install the “Blocks No insallation, access
Using the cloud it
were created, which accepts an integer number as a user input became easier and
Editor”. it from the browser
faster to use AI2.
in the rang (1-10), then the app finds all the odd numbers less
than the user input, and display them on the screen. This gave AI2 more
Add additional
Add additional Screens flexibility to access
Fifth day: the session consisted of two parts, (1) “Databases” Screens in Blocks or
in Designer screen only. some functionalities
Designer screen mode.
concept presented initially by the “Memory Save” activity in a from different screens.
way that students ask questions to each other and hear the
This gave the users the
answers, then they have to memorize these answers. The Blokes are categorized All blocks are
ability to browse all
students developed the “Guessing Game” app which used the in: Built-In, My Blocks, available under one
their blocks from one
and Advanced drawers. category.
concept of databases. (2) The second part of the day taught side.
mathematical operations in programming using simple Surprisingly, the .aia
examples. file is just a regular .zip
File extinction “.ZIP”. File extinction “.aia”. file. Hence, it may be
Sixth Day: was dedicated for final Projects (mobile apps) possible that .aia is just
presentation and winners announcement. renamed zip.

C. AI2 Improvements IV. EVALUATION

Based on our experience in using AI2 in this workshop,
many changes were made to AI2 to make it easier, and better.
The major improvement made to AI2 is moving everything to
the cloud, which made it cross-platform. No need to install
anything on your own computer to access AI2 editor, the user
can access it directly from any web browser. This improvement
eliminated the installation time; however, the students need to
download the AiStar.exe to use the emulator in case they do
not have an android mobile system.
On the other hand, AI2 made it easy to test apps using only
a Wi-Fi connection via the MIT AI2 Companion app. This
improvement lead to establishing one of the most important
goals in our workshop, making the students engaged. So, in
each day, after introducing a programming concept we asked
each student to code a program that applies that concept and
view them in their own mobile phones, which does not taking
long time to do so. The students were able to view their apps
each day rather than just develop a final project that may or
may not include all the introduced concepts, which gave them
enthusiasm and motivation for greater productivity.
Also, AI is known as a block based programming
environment, hence it has a group of defined blocks that aim to
do a certain operation. In the new version of AI, new blocks
were introduced to enhance the features of the created apps and
give the user more space to use more functions. One of the new
functions which were added in AI2 is “evaluate but ignore
result”, the block linked to this function will run, but its
returned result will be ignored. This can be useful if you define
a procedure that returns a result, but want to call it in a context
that does not accept a result. Another function was added in
AI2 is “Do then return” that minimizes the use of adding new
procedure where this block can do certain orders together and
return result. These new changes helped our students to use the
blocks easily and simply, and quickly understand their
functionalities due to their simple naming.
To recap the new improvements of AI2 over its predecessor
is summarized in Table 3.
In order to measure the success of the workshop two types
of evaluations were applied: (1) students' projects and (2)
workshop post survey.
A. Students' Projects
By teaching sixteen students divided into four groups, the
evaluation was done using AI2 where each group created a
project with their own ideas. The projects should contain
concepts taught during the workshop sessions to make sure that
our goals are accomplished.
Using the concept of random numbers, the first developed
project was a guessing game. This mobile app introduced a
game that aims to activate the human mind where one player is
needed to play. The lists concept was the theme of the second
project. The developed app was about learning Arabic letters
and how to pronounce them for non-Arabic speakers. The third
app used the database concept; it included some information
about mobile programming as well as Robotics world with an
interesting design and decorative pictures. The final project
was a medicine reminder app for elderly people. The concepts
applied in this project were loops and if-statements. Figure 1
shows screenshots of the four projects.
The four developed apps used several concepts taught
during the workshop such as methods, variables, lists,
databases, and if statements. This resulted in improving the
students' skills and programming thinking, as well as giving
them the ability to discover new features by self-learning.

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 38%
Pre 44%
18%

78%
Post 19%
3%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80%

Correct answers Wrong answers I Don't know answers

(1) (2)
FIGURE 2. PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS’ CORRECT, WRONG AND I DON'T KNOW
ANSWERS

On the other hand, to measure students motivation and

tendency towards programming field, Figure 3 shows the
percentage of the total students who agreed with the following
statements: (1) mobile programming is hard, (2) programming
concepts are complicated and (3) programming field is
interesting. We can observe from the results that the students
have slightly changed their minds regarding the first two
statements; however, the last statement has witnessed a great
positive result.

44%
(3) (4)
Pre 56%
FIGURE 1. STUDENTS' PROJECTS: (1) GUESSING GAME, (2) LEARNING ARABIC
69%
LETTERS, (3) INFORMATION ABOUT MOBILE & ROBOTICS PROGRAMMING AND
(4) MEDICINE REMINDER.

40%
B. Post survey results
Post 53%
Two surveys were distributed at the beginning and at the 100%
end of the workshop. Each survey has two types of questions,
the first type measures the students' knowledge about some
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
concepts related to programming, the second type measures
their motivation and tendency towards the programming field. Mobile Programming is hard
As for measuring the knowledge gained by the students Programming Concepts Complicated
before and after the workshop, the pre and post survey I am interested in programming field
consisted of six questions that covered the programming
concepts taught in our workshop. Each concept was tested with
FIGURE 3. STUDENT’S KNOWLEDGE AND TENDENCY TOWARD PROGRAMMING
one question that could be answered by one of three possible
answers: (correct, wrong and I don’t know). The results in
V. LESSONS LEARNED
Figure 2 show an increase in students understanding of the
presented programming concepts. The figure also shows the Despite the new improvements of AI2, yet there were some
aggregated correct versus wrong and I don’t know answers for limitations that students and instructors faced while using it,
all questions. The results show that most students were having among these limitations are:
wrong information at the beginning of the workshop, however,
x MIT App inventor did not work on some students’
after the workshop, their knowledge has increased, this is
devices, and
shown in the decrease of wrong and I don’t know answers.
x In programming blocks, variables initializations
sometimes does not work with 0, they must be
initialized to an empty text (“ ”), and there is no known
reason for that.

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 These limitations came up with lessons learned to both
students and trainers. Below are the lessons learned from AI2
and the workshop in general:
x Improve students' searching skills to solve any problem
faced in AI2.
x Think about how to find an alternative solution to come
over the limitations of AI2, e.g. AI2 does not support
more than 10 screens in each project, an alternative
solution was to use the visibility property for the
components in the screen.
x Support active learning through daily programming
assignments and applying learned concepts on their
mini programs.
x Support and encourage teamwork by rewarding daily
bonuses to each active group.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
A one week long mobile apps programming workshop
using AI2 was provided to high and middle school female
students. The workshop introduced basic programming
concepts by developing different android mobile apps.
AI block based environment was chosen for two reasons:
(1) the success of many previous workshops and courses that
used AI to teach programming, and (2) the new improvements
of AI2 over its previous version.
This paper also provided details on how AI2 enhanced our
teaching process and what we provided in our program for all
six days including daily activities and final mobile apps ideas.
We were also able to give students a chance to practice each
programming concept by building a specific mobile app
individually; this ensured that each student is trained enough in
all presented concepts.
Moreover, students' knowledge and opinions were solicited
by given pre and post surveys at the beginning and at the end
of the workshop. The survey tested the students' motivation and
tendency towards programming field and their knowledge on
some concepts related to programming. The results show
positive shift in students’ understanding on programming
concepts and on their motivation towards programming as a
field.
As a future addition to our course, we are planning to test
more block-based programming environments and compare
between them to decide which environment will be best for
developing advanced mobile applications. Furthermore, new
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teaching activities that apply kinetics for simplifying
programming concepts will be considered.
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