Skill progression in MIT app inventor

This paper contributes to the growing body of research that attempts to measure online, informal learning. We analyze skill progression in MIT App Inventor, an informal online learning environment with over 5 million users and 15.9 million projects/apps created. Our objective is to understand how people learn computational thinking concepts while creating mobile applications with App Inventor. In particular, we are interested in the relationship between the progression of skill in using App Inventor functionality and in using computational thinking concepts as learners create more apps. We model skill progression along two dimensions: breadth and depth of capability. Given a sample of 10,571 random users who have each created at least 20 apps, we analyze the relationship between demonstrating domain-specific skills by using App Inventor functionality and generalizable skills by using computational thinking concepts. Our findings indicate that domain-specific and generalizable skills progress similarly; there is a common pattern of expanding breadth of capability by using new skills over the first 10 projects, then developing depth of capability by using previously introduced skills to build more sophisticated apps.