Group collaboration with App Inventor

Abstract

Collaboration becomes increasingly important in programming as projects become more complex. With traditional text-based programming languages, programmers typically use a source code management system to manage the code, merge code from multiple authors, and optionally lock files for conflict-free editing. There is a limited corpus of work around collaborative editing of code in visual programming languages such as block-based programming. I present a collaborative programming environment to MIT App Inventor, a web-based visual platform for building Android applications with blocks, which enables many programmers to collaborate in real time on the same MIT App Inventor project. I design and implement three collaboration models to evaluate the efficacy of these different collaborative models for users of App Inventor so as to understand which approach best enables collaboration. Our results demonstrate that real-time programming decreases the completion time of a task, improves the interaction between users, and increases users' likeability towards collaborative programming. I anticipate that this new collaborative programming environment will change the way users use MIT App Inventor, and more curriculum based on the collaborative tools will be designed.