Android game development with AppInventor

Abstract

AppInventor is an educational learning tool provided by MIT that allows users to build Android apps without any knowledge of programming. As AppInventor gains popularity amongst educators and students around the world, it will become increasingly important to ensure that the tool offers its users the breadth and depth of app-development functionality they desire. In anticipation of AppInventor's expanding role and influence in educational institutions worldwide (middle schools and high-schools, primarily), this thesis focuses on the age group of 3rd to 12th grade students, and on the topic that is of greatest interest to them: gaming, animation, and graphics. The aim of this thesis is to identify AppInventor's existing capabilities and limitations with respect to game development, and to implement ideas (both pedagogical and technological in nature) that will improve the diversity, complexity, aesthetic appeal, and performance of games that can be built using AppInventor. The author of this thesis believes that if AppInventor's game development capabilities can be augmented, the adoption rate of the tool and its popularity amongst school students will be impacted very positively. In this thesis, the author describes his personal experiences teaching AppInventor game development in India and USA, as well as the limitations (in teaching methodology and in AppInventor's feature set) that he identified through this experience. The author's primary contributions are the development of a hands-on curriculum for a 40-hour AppInventor Game Development course, and the implementation of several new features and components for AppInventor. The author will be traveling to China and India in Summer 2012 to test to what extent his creative curriculum and novel AppInventor modifications facilitate the development of games using AppInventor.