Working with APIs in App Inventor

Abstract

App Inventor is a widely used tool for inexperienced developers to learn to program for the first time with block-based coding. Although it offers a wide range of capabilities to be used when building apps, there has previously been no simple way for users to take advantage of the immense library of online tools through APIs. This work implements a new framework in App Inventor that allows users to import and use any public API they find on the web, given its specification follows a standardized format. A small study with high school students was done after the implementation of this work, where they built apps that used the weather and OpenAI APIs to create their own weatherman app with ChatGPT. It was shown that this new API framework both strengthens an interest in programming and a career involving programming among students, and boosts their confidence in their ability to create their own innovative apps from the ground up.