Sayamindu’s Ramblings

App Inven­tor re-appeared last week, now hosted by MIT, and I have been fol­low­ing some of the dis­cus­sions in var­i­ous online forums fol­low­ing the (re)launch. I’m a bit sur­prised by the intense debate that seems to be going on among the com­ments about the value of block based pro­gram­ming. While fig­ur­ing out the inner work­ings of how your computer/mobile device works, and writ­ing low-level (assem­bly?) code is cer­tainly valu­able, that is not the goal of tools like App Inven­tor or Scratch. These tools uti­lize pro­gram­ming, but the larger, big pic­ture goal is to engage young peo­ple in acts of cre­ativ­ity that are also per­son­ally mean­ing­ful. Not every­one likes to cal­cu­late fac­to­ri­als after six months of learn­ing how to pro­gram. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant amount of value of hav­ing low bar­ri­ers to entry, and that, com­bined with the per­sonal mean­ing­ful­ness can cre­ate an extremely pow­er­ful medium for young learn­ers to engage in acts of cre­ativ­ity. Being able to cre­ate a mobile app, how­ever kludgy it might be, gives you immense sat­is­fac­tion, much more than being able to detect palin­dromes (at least for a major­ity). Pro­gram­ming has become more and more com­pli­cated over the years, slowly mov­ing any mean­ing­ful project out of reach of begin­ners — draw­ing a sin­gle line on a screen can require tens of lines of code. Tools like Scratch, App Inven­tor try to reverse the trend. That’s some­thing which most peo­ple seem to forget.

All this is noth­ing new for my usual cir­cle of friends and co-workers. How­ever, see­ing the com­ments and dis­cus­sions online reminded me that we need to do a bet­ter job of spread­ing these ideas.