Teaching Kids to Code: App Inventor

My 10 year old son recently asked to start doing some coding for school. He’s done some LEGO Boost projects in the past so I was looking for something that would be a bit more interesting. He has started using a smartphone for some things so I though building apps that he could run on his phone could be a good option. Enter, MIT App Inventor. This is a project that I had completely forgoten about. It allows students to build apps for their phones or tablets with a block style coding interface. You get access to many of the phone apis for sensors and cameras.

I’ve been assigning him tutorials from their YouTube channel. He has been loving it and has been asking when his next tutorial will be assigned. The fact that App Inventor makes it so easy to go from an idea to leveraging a lot of features on a smartphone is really fun for kids. I’m excited to see what he builds this week.

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