EdTech professor featured on MIT website

EdTech Assistant Professor Yu-Chang Hsu’s course, Mobile Apps Design for Teaching and Learning, uses a web-based tool called App Inventor, which allows non-programmers to design applications for mobile devices.

Hsu (pronounced Shoe) says App Inventor provides pre-programmed digital “blocks.” With training and practice, non-programmers can piece the blocks together to make working apps for mobile devices. Think of App Inventor as a computer version of Lincoln Logs.

Hsu taught the course last fall and wrote an article for the British Journal of Educational Technology. Well, you never know who’s going to read a journal article.

But Hsu knows.

He was contacted by Hal Ableson, an MIT professor and lead developer of—-you guessed it-—App Inventor. He was also contacted by a Google employee representing the CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) team.

Ableson and Google’s CS4HS team recognized Hsu as an early adapter of App Inventor in teacher education and asked him to share his story in a new MIT website that highlights how non-programmers are successfully using App Inventor to create functioning and useful mobile applications for various purposes.

Some people say you can’t teach programming with blocks, those pre-written packages of code that (gasp!) non-programmers can piece together like a picture puzzle. And just as exasperating is the idea that it might be taught online.

So here is Hsu, a professor at a university best known for its blue football field, who’s successfully teaching App Inventor online and, with co-authors Kerry Rice and Lisa Dawley, is telling the academic world how he did it.

Hsu told the MIT website audience that, “Many students in the class commented on the potential of AI for engaging K-16 students in developing logical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and of course--fun and useful apps.”

You can see all of Hsu’s comments at: http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/stories/teaching-mobile-app-design-app-inventor-boise-state-university and if you want to see the comments of other contributors, click on the Stories link at the top.