some other tools for creating apps you should see

For those who are interested in making apps without programming, one of the first and most powerful options is GameSalad (http://gamesalad.com/)  It uses the same sort of drag-and-drop into a flowchart that you have seen in other applications.  It is huge.  60 of the top 100 apps in the app store we built with GameSalad, including a #1 title.  It uses a fremium model, and you can do a whole lot with the free version.  I have used it a great deal in my classes and students have shared games with each other and put them online.  For 100 bucks, you can get an IOS developer license and put your games in the app store, even with the free version.  I am still waiting for my school to cough up the hundred and, on a matter of principle, haven’t paid it out of my pocket yet.

Another great choice that gets you a little cl0ser to real programming is AppInventor.  It was originally created by a member of the Scratch team that was on a sort of sabbatical at Google.  So Google helped build and support it and once it got off the ground, they gave it back to MIT to help them start a new mobile for education department.  You can see it and use it here.  It is a lot like Scratch, using ‘code blocks’ that you drag-and-drop rather than having to type code.

Stencylworks is another one that is built on the Scratch-style interface, but it also has a flowchart system so it sort of falls in between the previous two I mentioned.  It was built with education in mind and is goo in the classroom.  It also allows for export for IOS.

Finally, after reading so many comments about how great it is to be able to write an app without having to learn to code, I think what so many people don’t realize is that (a) coding isn’t that hard and in fact can be fun and (b) once you get the hang of it, it is usually much easier to do it that way.

Here’s an example of a simple project that I made to provide a model of a project for my students:

http://studio.sketchpad.cc/sp/pad/view/g08CSyut4l/latest

Every time you click on the screen, a circle appears that starts floating in a random direction.  If it reaches the edge of the screen, it bounces.  Very simple, but I have seen paid apps aimed at babies and toddlers that do exactly the same thing except that the circle looks more like a bubble.  Notice, there’s only about 20 lines of code there.  To do the same thing using the sorts of programs listed above is actually a lot harder and more time-consuming.  I did this one about 2 weeks after I learned to write my first computer program.

 

Posted in: Week 05: