App Inventor is a great way to teach students coding while building an app.
Community Review for MIT App Inventor
My Take
App Inventor is a great way to have students problem solve and become critical thinkers. Students were up and coding on the website, but needed some extra support on how to use the website. We also needed to download and install some software in order to see how the app works on a phone, but our tech department did not want to do this. We are looking at a work around for that. Great site for students who know some coding, but are not advanced enough to write an app from the ground up.
How I Use It
I am having students in my programming class use App Inventor to create apps for our school. My students had some great ideas for apps, but programming them from scratch in Java is way above their skill level. App Inventor is allowing my students to create apps that we hope will be used by other students in our school.