UAPPI: A Platform for Extending App Inventor Towards the Worlds of IoT and Machine Learning

App Inventor

App Inventor for Android is a visual programming platform for creating mobile applications (apps) for Android-based smartphones and tablets. It was developed at Google Labs by a team led by Hal Abelson on sabbatical from MIT (Abelson, 2009). Today, App Inventor runs as a web application administered by staff at MIT’s Center for Mobile Learning - a collaboration of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab. The App Inventor source code is available under an open-source license, allowing anyone to deploy App Inventor servers. In 2014, MIT hosted the web IDE, servicing 87,000 users per week, with a total of over 2.2 million registered users who developed 5.5 million apps (Schiller et al, 2014). Today this free online app development environment serves more than 6 million registered users, who have created almost 22 million apps (http://www.alice.org) in that they revolve around block-based languages. Developing apps in App Inventor or these other languages does not require writing textual code. The look and behavior of the app is developed visually, using a series of building blocks for each intended component. Like its competitors, App Inventor aims to make programming enjoyable and accessible to novices.