Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications
MIT App Inventor is a web service that enables users with little to no previous programming experience to create mobile applications using a visual blocks language. We analyze a sample of 5,228 random projects from the corpus of 9.7 million and group projects by functionality. We then use the number...
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98913 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0725-288X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5328-7821 |
| _version_ | 1811084276214530048 |
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| author | Xie, Benjamin X. Shabir, Isra Abelson, Hal |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Xie, Benjamin X. Shabir, Isra Abelson, Hal |
| author_sort | Xie, Benjamin X. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | MIT App Inventor is a web service that enables users with little to no previous programming experience to create mobile applications using a visual blocks language. We analyze a sample of 5,228 random projects from the corpus of 9.7 million and group projects by functionality. We then use the number of unique blocks in projects as a metric to better understand the usability and realized capability of using App Inventor to implement specific functionalities. We introduce the notion of a usability score and our results indicate that introductory tutorials heavily influence the usability of App Inventor to implement particular functionalities. Our findings suggest that the sequential nature of App Inventor’s learning resources results in users realizing only a portion of App Inventor’s capabilities and propose improvements to these learning resources that are transferable to other programming environments and tools. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:48:09Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/98913 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:48:09Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/989132022-09-28T10:05:52Z Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications Xie, Benjamin X. Shabir, Isra Abelson, Hal Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Abelson, Hal Xie, Benjamin X. Shabir, Isra Abelson, Hal MIT App Inventor is a web service that enables users with little to no previous programming experience to create mobile applications using a visual blocks language. We analyze a sample of 5,228 random projects from the corpus of 9.7 million and group projects by functionality. We then use the number of unique blocks in projects as a metric to better understand the usability and realized capability of using App Inventor to implement specific functionalities. We introduce the notion of a usability score and our results indicate that introductory tutorials heavily influence the usability of App Inventor to implement particular functionalities. Our findings suggest that the sequential nature of App Inventor’s learning resources results in users realizing only a portion of App Inventor’s capabilities and propose improvements to these learning resources that are transferable to other programming environments and tools. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Google Research and Innovation Scholarship) 2015-09-28T12:31:30Z 2015-09-28T12:31:30Z 2015-10 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98913 Xie, Benjamin, Isra Shabir, and Hal Abelson. "Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications." 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) (October 2015). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0725-288X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5328-7821 en_US http://2015.splashcon.org/event/promoto2015-measuring-the-usability-and-capability-of-app-inventor-to-create-mobile-applications Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Abelson |
| spellingShingle | Xie, Benjamin X. Shabir, Isra Abelson, Hal Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title | Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title_full | Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title_fullStr | Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title_full_unstemmed | Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title_short | Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications |
| title_sort | measuring the usability and capability of app inventor to create mobile applications |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98913 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0725-288X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5328-7821 |
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