App Inventor for Android allows people with little or no programming
experience to create smart phone applications on the Android platform. This
is accomplished by using drag-and-drop UI design and blocks-oriented visual
programming. We offered an experimental section during the closed beta
testing of App Inventor for Android in which we used Studio-Based Learning
to foster positive learning experiences. Studio-Based Learning is a pedagogical
approach in which students build their own representations of their knowledge
and share these, formally and informally, with both experts and peers. Our
students worked in teams on several projects, with the sixteen students creating
over thirty Android applications while learning fundamentals of Computer
Science.