I did some experimentation with MIT App Inventor today.

Pros:

  • Easy to find information in the editor interface
  • Quite a few features for accessing sensors
  • Web-based browser

Cons:

  • Tricky and case specific solutions
  • Performance is quite slow on the emulator / companion app
  • Very few options to customize built-in blocks
  • Difficult to replicate designs involving multiple components (no prefabbing)

I can definitely see how tricky it would be to share specific solutions or to organize a workshop around this interface. Even when searching forums for error solutions (example 1, example 2), what I could find were screenshots with annotated explanations in order to be able to reproduce specific arrangements. This is quite convoluted and can be very tricky to get used to. This is a similar problem to other visual editors, but when they have ways to easily switch between the portability of code and the visual editor this problem is less severe.

I’m not feeling 100% confident in using the app inventor for the experiments. It is quick enough for accessing the sensors, but it is very slow to make that information significant in expressive ways: moving images, playing sound, triggering events, changing stored information.