MIT Libraries logoDSpace@MIT

MIT
View Item 
  • DSpace@MIT Home
  • MIT Open Access Articles
  • MIT Open Access Articles
  • View Item
  • DSpace@MIT Home
  • MIT Open Access Articles
  • MIT Open Access Articles
  • View Item
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications

Author(s)
Xie, Benjamin X.; Shabir, Isra; Abelson, Hal
Thumbnail
Downloadmeasuring usability.pdf (434.1Kb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY

Open Access Policy

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike

Terms of use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
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.
Date issued
2015-10
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98913
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Journal
Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
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).
Version: Author's final manuscript

Collections
  • MIT Open Access Articles

Browse

All of DSpaceCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

My Account

Login

Statistics

OA StatisticsStatistics by CountryStatistics by Department
MIT Libraries
PrivacyPermissionsAccessibilityContact us
MIT
Content created by the MIT Libraries, CC BY-NC unless otherwise noted. Notify us about copyright concerns.