Using App Inventor to teach Computer Science Principes

How I Use It

I learned to use App Inventor as a supplementary resource to teach the College Board's pilot AP Computer Science Principles course. There is a web based curriculum to teach the AP CSP course by Ralph Morelli and others that uses App Inventor; the name of the curriculum is Mobile CSP. I use App Inventor to teach students Computer Science Principles, creating computer programs based on the Learning Objectives of the CSP course. I teach students the fundamentals of programming, such methods or procedures, events, If-Else statements, Loops and Lists. I also use App Inventor to teach students computing and computational thinking skills, and also some of the big ideas as listed by the AP CSP curriculum framework. This includes abstraction, algorithms, creativity and programming. What worked was creating apps for an android with App Inventor, teaching these concepts and students learning them. What was challenging was the setup and having access to enough devices to upload the apps; we also used a cell phone simulator provided by App Inventor, but that was crash and cause problems running it in a computer lab. I wish they would improve the simulator so that it did not crash so often.