The informal interactions during a pitch meeting provide insight to aid in designing
just-in-time interventions: the best time to introduce a new concept is when students
realize that there is something they need to learn to accomplish their goals. For example,
after having some experience with the TinyWebDB component-an App Inventor block
that allows a program to communicate with a simple AppEngine data store-some of the
students wanted to create a Web site to showcase a high score list stored in the database,
and they wanted the entries to be sorted. I explained that the best way I knew how to do
this was to do some server-side scripting with Python using AppEngine, and when I asked
if this was something they wanted to learn about, the vote was a unanimously positive.
I prepared a tutorials session on Python scripting for AppEngine, and the students did a
great job with it. Perhaps most importantly, they were able to interpret the Python code
constructs (specifically methods, loops, iteration, and conditionals) in terms of the App
Inventor for Android components that they knew.