Introduction to Computer Science with Scratch and App Inventor

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Introduction to App Inventor These materials are based on the App Inventor tutorials available online: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/tutorials/ What is App Inventor? App Inventor is free software available from Google that allows you to build apps for Android phones using a drag-and-drop interface similar to that of Scratch. Where can I get App Inventor? App Inventor is available for free download at: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/ Follow the directions to install it at home Do I need an Android Phone? If you have an Android based smart phone, you can put the apps you create on your phone. However, if you don’t have an Android phone, you can still build apps with App Inventor. The Inventor contains an emulator that lets you simulate a phone on your computer. Example of the Android emulator that you can use to test your App Inventor programs. What do I need to run App Inventor? To use App Inventor, you will need a Google account. If you have gmail, you already have a Google account. If you do not have gmail, you can easily set up a Google account using your existing email address. To create a Google account, go to www.google.com and click on the Sign In link in the upper right hand corner of the screen. On the next page, click on create an account now. Follow the instructions that appear to create your account. Note that you will need access to an existing email account to complete the process. Make sure you have a Google account before proceeding with the App Inventor portion of the workbook. mbrace Game Development Workbook Page 32
App Inventor Interface The App Inventor interface is a bit more complicated than Scratch. You will use three different windows to work on your project. The first window you will use is App Inventor itself. You will use this window to create new projects and to add user interface elements and resources (like sound files and images) to your programs. App Inventor is run through a web browser, like Firefox or Chrome and can be found at http://appinventor.googlelabs.com From App Inventor, you can open the Blocks Editor. Blocks Editor looks a lot like the script building area of Scratch. There is a menu of blocks on the left hand side of the screen. You have one tab for built in blocks that can be used in all projects. The other tab says my blocks and contains blocks that are tied to specific user interface elements in your program. From the blocks editor, you can launch and connect to an emulator. The emulator is used to build and debug your program if you don’t have access to an Android phone. In this workbook, we will be using the emulator for all of our work. If you have access to an Android phone, you can follow the directions online for running your programs on your phone. mbrace Game Development Workbook Page 33
Page 1 and 2: Introduction to Computer Science wi
Page 3 and 4: LESSON 1: Getting Started with Scra
Page 5 and 6: I decided to pick a dinosaur. You c
Page 7 and 8: The direction that your sprite move
Page 9 and 10: Let’s add some yellow wait blocks
Page 11 and 12: Changing the Background on the Stag
Page 13 and 14: To use an if block to control the m
Page 15 and 16: Costumes and Animation Now that you
Page 17 and 18: Other useful blocks are the say and
Page 19 and 20: ? Now we know how to tell when the
Page 21 and 22: Here is one script that works. To m
Page 23 and 24: After you create a variable, you wi
Page 25 and 26: Winning, Losing, and Game Play Our
Page 27 and 28: You might have noticed that when th
Page 29 and 30: Click the checkbox next to timer to
Page 31: Scratch Review Now you have built y
Page 35 and 36: The first thing that we will do is
Page 37 and 38: To add the mole to our program, we
Page 39 and 40: Your Blocks Editor Screen should lo
Page 41 and 42: We know that our X and Y locations
Page 43 and 44: Our mole shows up in the emulator,
Page 45 and 46: The last thing we need is the value
Page 47 and 48: Team Project Worksheet We have lear

Introduction to Computer Science with Scratch and App Inventor

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