Become an App Inventor: The Official Guide from Mit App Inventor: Your Guide to Designing, Building, and Sharing Apps by Karen Lang, Mit App Inventor Project, Mit Computer Science and Artificial Inte, Selim Tezel
Published by Miteen Press on February 8, 2022
ISBN: 1536219142
Pages: 224
Genres: Non-Fiction
Format: Chapter Book Nonfiction
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MIT App Inventor is a web-based programming environment for creating apps to run on smartphones and tablets. Any middle or high school student who has had a chance to code with MIT’s Scratch should recognize the similarities and feel comfortable moving to App Inventor and try its six apps (a maze game and musical instrument are two of the apps). The book has a thorough Introduction, listing all the things needed to begin your first app. An overall attractive layout design has many screen shots on cream-colored pages with so much white space that personal copies of this book likely have notes scribbled everywhere. Each chapter has its own header color, so it is possible to flip between chapters quickly. True stories of real coders, as young as twelve, pepper the book, and those have color down the length of the page. Once you realize the color significance, any time you need a confidence booster, you could quickly open the book to a coder’s story. The six apps included in the book are intended to use in sequence, the skills learned for one building into the skills learned and used for the next. The Conclusion section, perhaps not the usual next spot for reading after an early chapter, is where any struggling beginner programmer finds mention of tutorials available online.

Reviewed by Betsey Noble, Dresden Elementary School