Google App Inventor Resurrected as Open Source Project

Google and MIT released the App Inventor source code last week.

MIT annouces that Google's App Inventor is now open source, although contributions to the code will not be accepted until the MIT Center of Mobile Learning opens their App Inventor server to the public. "We hope to nurture a robust and active open-source project eventually, but for now we don't want to distract the MIT developers from their efforts to complete and deploy the large-scale public server," the announcement says. The MIT Public App Inventor Service is scheduled for release in Q1 of this year.

Apparently some Google App Inventor users weren't aware that the Google service would be shut down and didn't save their projects in time. A post on the MIT App Inventor developers' blog says that 95% of the projects were saved as zip files in the users' Google Docs accounts.

On the MIT App Inventor EDU page, you can read stories about App Inventor in action in educational environments. For example, App Inventor is as a core curriculum course to non-computer-science majors. "Many of the students take the course because they hate Math and the course covers this dreaded requirement," according to the post. In another story, Leshell Hately talks on video about Youth App Lab and how App Inventor and MIT's Scratch program help introduce computer science to African American youth from Washington, DC.

• Programming
• App Inventor
• Google
• MIT
• open source
• Scratch