MIT App Inventor Blog

Are you teaching App Inventor in a course this Spring, or beginning a course soon? Then you are eligible to apply for early access to the experimental version of App Inventor at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning. Apply by filling out the form at: http://bit.ly/MitEarly

It's been three months since we started work on App Inventor at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning and three weeks since Google's public service went offline. Here's brief progress report on the replacement public service we'll be deploying at MIT.

So far (knock on wood) our development effort is on track for releasing the MIT Public App Inventor Service in the first quarter of this year. While unexpected issues can always arise, we're guardedly optimistic that people who plan to run App Inventor courses or workshops can anticipate being able to use the MIT service by mid-April.

Google and MIT are pleased to announce the initial free and open-source release from Google of the App Inventor source code at http://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-releases/.

There's little supporting documentation yet, and we’re not accepting contributions to the code now. That will happen later, after the MIT Center of Mobile Learning opens their App Inventor server to the public.

The Center for Mobile Learning is planning to deploy a public App Inventor service some time in the first quarter of 2012, to replace the service that Google will be turning off at the end of December. We've just launched an experimental prototype, and we're looking for people to help test the service. We'll start by opening the service to a small number of testers, and we'll add more testers as we gain experience over the next several weeks.

Starting today, the Center for Mobile Learning is distributing Java Archive (JAR) files that let people run their own versions of App Inventor on Google App Engine.

I’m happy to use this first post in our App Inventor Development Blog to announce that MIT work on App Inventor is underway, and even happier to introduce Andrew McKinney as our newly hired technical lead for the Center and for App Inventor development.  Andrew has a 20-year history of educational technology leadership at Harvard and MIT, including being lead developer on MIT’s Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) physics project, which was MIT’s signature redesign of our freshman physics courses.  You’ll be hearing from Andrew in subsequent postings to this blog.
 
Right now, our top development priority at the Center is to build an App Inventor service for general public access.  This will be similar to the one Google currently runs and is planning to take offline at the end the year as announced last summer on the App Inventor Announcement Forum.

Welcome, I'm Josh Sheldon, an educational technologist and research & communications professional who's working on planning and building MIT's App Inventor Edu site. Currently, the site is mostly brochure-ware, though we do have our first two feature stories of successful use of App Inventor in educational settings ready for your viewing.