Workshop — Google App Inventor for Android: Creating mobile applications as a first computing experience

App Inventor for Android is a visual programming environment being created by Google that enables non-programmers to easily build mobile phone applications. It will become publicly available starting in 2010. A prototype implementation was piloted in introductory computer science courses at 12 colleges and universities in Fall 2009. App Inventor is designed to let students with no previous computing experience explore mobile applications, including communication, location-awareness, social networking, and massive Web-based data collections. One goal of App Inventor to change the nature of introductory computing, to make it less dissociated: more about people and their interactions with others and with the world around them. We want to enable young people - and everyone - to engage the world of mobile services and applications as creators, not just as consumers. This workshop will provide (1) a hands-on introduction to using App Inventor; (2) demonstrations of effective teaching techniques in order to help attendees decide whether and how to offer similar courses; (3) discussions by faculty in the pilot projects of their experiences and their students' work (4) time for general discussion of creating mobile applications as an introduction to computing.