Monitoring Students’ Perceptions in an App Inventor School Course

Abstract

MIT App Inventor is a block-based programming environment for children and teenagers that sets a “low floor” for allowing creative app building while engaging students in complex computational thinking activities. The present study aims at (a) monitoring students’ perceptions on ‘popularity’ and ‘perceived difficulty’ of certain activities/lessons through the implementation of an App Inventor course in a Greek lower high school, (b) detecting any course design or activity/lesson plan and implementation factors that affected students’ perceptions and finally (c) evaluating their experience with App Inventor in contrast with their previous experience with MicroWorlds Pro and Scratch. Our study confirms students’ positive perceptions such as positive task value beliefs and self-efficacy, identifies features of successful “resources learning” in competence-based learning and finally offers a students’ comparison between App Inventor, MicroWorlds Pro and Scratch.