EdTech 597 My First Mobile App

During week 3 of EdTech 597 – Mobile Apps Design for Teaching and Learning, we got to dive into the App Inventor book and start creating. App Inventor utilizes blocks to represent the necessary code to create an app. Think fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. You can’t force the wrong pieces together and expect to end up with the desired image. I took EdTech 597 – Introduction to Edutainment in Spring 2013. This class introduced me to Scratch, an animation software also created at MIT. Scratch allows the user to create animated stories, quizzes and games. The code for the animation is also represented by blocks that fit on a specific manner. With my exposure to Scratch, I felt that I had a slight advantage when it came to working with App Inventor.

My first mobile app was to recreate App Inventor’s “Pet the Kitty” app. It took me less than an hour to read, load the software and arrange the code properly to make this app. I am not sure who was more thrilled by the app. Me for being able to create such a simple app so quickly or my kids who got a kick out of me making the phone meow like a cat. After creating the app as instructed in the App Inventor book, I devised ways to modify it by changing the kitty picture, adding an additional sound, and causing the background color to change when a different action occurs.

The initial screen image of “Pet the Kitty”

Here is a picture of the initial screen image and the QR code to view this modified “Pet the Kitty” app. This app will only work on the Android platform and will require that your phone will allow apps to be downloaded from places other than the Google Play Store (Android Market).

QR Code to upload “Pet the Kitty” mobile app