The Evaluation of Tools for Android Application Programming

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to experiment with the effectiveness of MIT App Inventor (AI) as a tool to develop a mobile application for 125 students in Malaysia Polytechnics. The experiments run for four months with five hours of class each week and the students were divided into two groups. The first group consist of 50 students and learned using AI. The second group is 75 students and were given Android Studio (AS) as the development tool. The results show that the majority of the students in the group that used AI as development tool able to complete more project that the group that developed their apps using AS. They also have shown positive feedback towards the tool and find that using AI is much easier, faster and able to assist the learning of the low skilled learner when compared to the group that learned using programming language tools such as AS. The finding of this study can be an added value for educators to consider AI as one of the visual programming tools for their computer science classes