App Inventor Teaching Material Design And Development

Computers are universal currently, and computational thinking has become one of the basic ways of thinking, so schools should pay more attention to development the computational thinking of students. App Inventor is a tool that can quickly develop mobile applications, because it uses modular splicing method. You can use it to develop your own mobile applications, even if you know nothing about programming languages. It is clear that it makes computer programming language simple and fun, and it is beneficial to developing the students ’ computational thinking ability. However, there are not many textbooks about App Inventor at home and abroad at present, and less of them specifically for first-year junior high school students.Therefore, combining with computational thinking and features of App Inventor, I built a learning model. In this learning model, teachers become designers, organizers and facilitators, and students collaborate with each other to use computational thinking to ask questions, solve problems, and develop their computational thinking ability. Based on this model, I designed and developed the App Inventor textbook for first-year junior high school students. I hope that this textbook can provide references for the information technology educators.This paper consists of five chapters:Chapter One: Introduction. Mainly introduces the research background, research questions, research significance, and research methods.Chapter Ⅱ: Introduces App Inventor and the theoretical basis of textbooks. Mainly introduces the concepts, features and advantages of App Inventor. Also, there is an overview of instruction theoretical basis.Chapter Ⅲ: Overview of design and development of the App Inventor textbook. Includes analysis of learner characteristics and design of teaching objectives, contents, teaching model and evaluation methods.Chapter Ⅳ: The preparation of the App Inventor textbook. Three chapters in the textbook are listed.Chapter Ⅴ: Research summary and Outlook. A summary of the research results and the follow-up to the research.