An educational approach to machine learning with mobile applications

Abstract

Machine learning has increasingly become a major topic in computer science for students to learn. However, it can be quite technical and thus difficult for students to grasp, especially those in high school and under. To make machine learning and its applications more accessible to younger students, we developed a series of machine learning extensions for MIT App Inventor. MIT App Inventor is a web application for users with minimal programming experience to easily and quickly build mobile applications, and these extensions allow users to build applications that incorporate powerful machine learning functionality. These extensions were tested over a 6-week class with about 10 students and can be used as an educational tool.