2026-09-18T20:56:23Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1063862026-06-06T00:55:16Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Hal Abelson.
Tsai, Sylvan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2017-01-12T18:18:41Z
2017-01-12T18:18:41Z
2016
2016
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106386
967660310
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-64).
MIT App Inventor is a visual blocks language that allows users to create mobile applications for Android. App Inventor users have the option of posting in a public support forum to discuss anything from specific programming issues to education issues. In order to leverage the information on the forums to improve App Inventor, we must first understand what is being discussed. In this thesis, we used unsupervised machine learning methods to automate discovery of discussion topics. First, we transformed posts into feature vectors using a bag-of-words model. Next, we clustered posts using k-means clustering and evaluated our results both quantitatively, by calculating the average silhouette of the posts, and qualitatively, by simply looking at the clusters of posts. Finally, we used LDA topic modeling to determine the topics being discussed and compared the extracted topic words to a manual evaluation of each cluster. Using this technique, we were able to uncover common problems with App Inventor that users encountered. We hope to use this information to improve users' experience with App Inventor.
by Sylvan Tsai.
M.Eng.
64 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Understanding App Inventor forums
Thesis
application/pdf
Publication
unknown
unknown
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