Yes, you can create your own apps for Android devices--and it's easy to do. This extraordinary book introduces you to App Inventor 2, a powerful visual tool that lets anyone build apps. Learn App Inventor basics hands-on with step-by-step instructions for building more than a dozen fun projects, including a text answering machine app, a quiz app, and an app for finding your parked car!
The second half of the book features an Inventor's Manual to help you understand the fundamentals of app building and computer science. App Inventor 2 makes an excellent textbook for beginners and experienced developers alike.
- Use programming blocks to build apps--like working on a puzzle
- Create custom multi-media quizzes and study guides
- Design games and other apps with 2D graphics and animation
- Make a custom tour of your city, school, or workplace
- Control a LEGO(R) MINDSTORMS(R) NXT robot with your phone
- Build location-aware apps by working with your phone's sensors
- Explore apps that incorporate information from the Web
David Wolber is a leader in App Inventor education and teaching beginners how to program their phones and tablets. His focus is empowering artists, designers, kids, women, men, humanity majors, business students--makers of all types--to add coding to their creative arsenals. His teaching materials, video screencasts, and course-in-a-box are available at appinventor.org, and his students have been chronicled in articles of the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wired Magazine. David is a professor at the University of San Francisco. He taught one of the first App Inventor courses in 2009 as part of a Google pilot and has been teaching and working with the App Inventor teaching community ever since. His teaching materials on the Google and MIT sites, and on appinventor.org, have provided the first introduction to coding for thousands of new app builders, and his course-in-a-box materials have served as a template for many App Inventor courses at the K-12 and university levels. David recently took a sabbatical at MIT to work with co-author Hal Abelson and contribute to the development of App Inventor 2. He also is contributing to the Mobile Computer Science Principles (mobile-csp.org) course for the new Advanced Placement (AP) course is US high schools.