In this chapter we will go beyond using apps to develop coding skills by building your own apps that you can share and use on your mobile devices. There are a number of easy to use programs that allow you to build apps using simple visual programming languages. Two of the leaders in the field of app building for education are Microsoft Research’s TouchDevelop (www.touchdevelop.com) and MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) App Inventor2 (http://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu). These are both free to use. You can use these to create apps using a PC or Apple, Microsoft and Android platforms and, as both systems are cloud based, you can create and use your apps across devices. For example, you could create an app on one device and then continue developing on another, opening up the possibility for children to continue with their projects outside the classroom. Although the TouchDevelop and App Innovator apps are only available for Android mobile devices, you can use the browser on a PC, Mac, iPad or iPhone to both build and play the apps and share with the online community.
App Inventor was originally developed by Google who then sold it to MIT’s Centre for Mobile Learning for further development. Their version, the App Inventor2, was released in 2012. Mitch Resnick is part of this team; he also helped to develop the popular coding program Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) and when you start using App Inventor2 you will see very similar blocks of visual codes that can be dragged and clicked into place.
In this chapter we will focus on the TouchDevelop app creator, which can also be used via the browser on your PC or tablet. This free to use visual programming environment is developed by Microsoft Research. It can provide a transition from visual programming in Scratch to text-based programming between Key Stages 2 and 3. The environment allows you to pick suggested commands and search for commands; it also provides hints for next steps and to help you identify bugs.