Building an online community of creators through MIT App Inventor

Abstract

An online community whose primary activity involves sharing personal creations is called an Online Community of Creators (OCOC). These communities provide a space where one user's work can serve as inspiration for others and where users can offer feedback to each other, thus fostering creativity and helping users learn and grow. I designed and implemented a stand-alone gallery where App Inventor programmers can showcase their projects and receive feedback on their work. The goals of this new gallery were (1) to encourage more users to share their projects and (2) to increase the discoverability of shared projects among the App Inventor community. Based on the user study results, the new gallery addresses many usability pain points that users faced in the old gallery. Users expressed that they are more likely to share projects and view projects using the new gallery. By continuing to improve the usability of the gallery user interface, we hope to encourage even more users to publish projects to the gallery and to explore projects created by other members of the App Inventor community.