Teaching middle school students to program with App Inventor 2

As we head into Computer Education week, I thought I'd share how successful we've been teaching middle school students to program using App Inventor. We teach at two schools in different settings. One setting is an after-school club that meets weekly for 2 hours at an all girl public school. The other is a class at a high poverty school which meets daily one week of each month, The class is part of the Stem Scholars program and the students for this class are all minority boys..

There are three of us developing the club/class content. I'm an engineer who has been programming for a VERY long time in a variety of languages, Vicki has a PhD in Computer Science and is a former professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University and Janet is an education consultant with a PhD in Mathematics Education and a former middle school math teacher. 

App Inventor is by far the best introductory platform we've found. It provides rich functionality in a fairly easy to learn programming environment. Initially, several teachers commented that they didn't believe a visual programming environment was "real programming". However, now that the students have created a variety of fully functional apps, I think we've convinced them. 

We started teaching last year using other tools, but found that the lack of functionality made it difficult to keep the students engaged. There has been NO ISSUE with maintaining the student's interest and enthusiasm using App Inventor. I can't tell you how excited the students are when they install and run an app they created.

We reached several milestones last month. Our students were able to debug an application they had not seen before and correct its behavior. Also, the students started bringing new students to the club, simply because we are having so much fun.

We decided to work with middle school students because we found the students needed an understanding of Common Core Math 5 concepts. We teach mostly sixth and seventh grade students, but there are several ninth graders in the club. 

Neither school had appropriate hardware for running the apps, but tablets were donated to each school so we could use App Inventor. Both schools had sufficient WIFI capability. About a third of the students have their own android device.

At each school we found a teacher (and sometimes several teachers) that were enthusiastic about sponsoring our program. Because we are still developing the course, we lead the program at each school and the teachers have done an outstanding job supporting us.. 

I just wanted to let you know how much we appreciate having App Inventor and how thrilled we are with our students' success..