App Inventor 2.0-concept of innovative methodologies

A series of 6 methodologies for teaching computer science as a general education subject at high school for the area of Algorithmic Problem Solving using the App Inventor 2.0. The methodologies are prepared as a superstructure over the basic programming course and are primarily intended for students of 2nd year of high school.

Starting points for the development of innovative methodologies

Students are being encouraged to develop their research skills, e.g. they should be able to formulate and test hypotheses, experiment, express the results of experimentation in different forms, draw conclusions and argue. The methodologies have been developed by using an exploratory approach in which we aim to make the students as active as possible during the lesson.

The use of innovative methodologies in teaching

The methodologies are prepared for 6 lessons but it is very likely that students will not be able to complete everything. According to the information from the first validation of our methodologies, we have marked some activities with an asterisk. These tasks can be omitted by the teacher or given to the students as their homework.

Innovative methodologies content for App Inventor

Teaching involves programming mobile applications for the Android operating system in MIT App Inventor environment. This environment allows programming mobile devices using block concatenation. Concepts, features and capabilities of individual components are to be discovered by the pupils themselves using worksheets. Teachers and students may encounter problems when connecting mobile devices to a computer. We have developed special documents for these technical procedures - guides for the individual connection options. We offer a document for making a connection using an emulator. We find this method relatively simple and useful in case the teacher needs to show the development and running of a mobile application on a data projector.