Using App Inventor as Tool for Creating Mathematics Applications for Mobile Devices with Android OS

Abstract

People are programming on their personal computers since the 1980s, but today's mobile applications are making computing as “personal” as never before. Never in the history of the use of technology in education has there been a technology so widely available to citizens as mobile technology. According to this trend, we are moving into a new era of consuming information via mobile computing, one that promises greater variety in applications, highly improved usability, and networking. Our consuming information culture gives us all sorts of opportunities for entertainment, even learning using high-tech devices, which are considered to be black boxes to most of us, because only few people can create applications. Even though, more and more students are interested in developing their own mobile applications. In this context, we present our experience with App Inventor - a user friendly platform and drag-and-drop block language to create Android apps. The present paper is an intro to the creation process for an applied mathematics app, started 4 years ago, corresponding to the requirements of our classroom consuming information culture.