(MAD) Mobile App Development Environment Module Overview

Mobile App Development Environment Module Overview

The App Inventor development environment is supported for Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Windows operating systems, and several popular Android phone models. Applications created with App Inventor can be installed on any Android phone.

When we talk about apps, we need to understand the two basic parts - components and behaviors. If you think about the apps that you use every day, they are designed with components that you interact with by clicking a button, touching the screen or shaking the device. When this action occurs, the app will respond to the event with some type of action. This is called Event Driven Programming. The App Inventor Environment handles the components that are created to trigger the event and the programming of the component to respond to the event in two different areas. The component designer is the area for creating and arranging the components on the screen. These components are then programmed by creating events and event handling methods in the blocks editor area.  

In this module you will create apps that will respond to an event by creating components in the designer view and programming the behaviors in the blocks editor area. You will use your previous knowledge of programming constructs to build the behaviors for the app.  

Essential Questions

  • What is Event Driven Programming?
  • How are components used to trigger an event?
  • How do you use the Blocks Editor to specify components used to trigger an event?
  • How do you create event handling methods to respond to an event?
  • How do you use layout components to design the user interface?
  • How are programming constructs used to program an app?
  • Why would you want to change the properties of an object or component?

Key Terms

  1. Behavior - an app's behavior is how the app responds to user initiated and external events.
  2. Blocks editor - the screen found by clicking the blocks button on the design screen; this is where you tell your app what to do.
  3. Block - blocks are the pieces you connect together to tell your app what to do; they can be found in the blocks editor.
  4. Canvas - a canvas is a sub panel of a screen where you can draw or animate.
  5. Components - components are the programming elements used to build an app and can be programmed to perform actions.
  6. Emulator - the name of the fake phone that appears on your computer if you don't have an Android device to work with is an emulator.
  7. Event - an action triggered by user interaction such as clicking a button.  
  8. Event driven - we say that an app is event driven because it depends on events to know what to do.
  9. Event handler - a part of a program that runs when triggered by an event such as pressing a button.
  10. Global variables - a variable that can be accessed in multiple scopes; this means that wherever you are in the program you can use that variable; get its current value or set its value to something else.
  11. Local variables - a variable that is declared within a function or it is an argument passed into a function; this means that you can only access these variables in that specific function where they are declared or passed in as an argument.
  12. Palette - the broadest/outer most box that holds drawers.
  13. Properties - the state of an object or component.

[CC BY 4.0] UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED | IMAGES: LICENSED AND USED ACCORDING TO TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION