Greetings from Arizona! I landed here this morning in Pheonix for the Mobile Learning Experience 2012 in Pheonix. I will be presenting our work on "mobilizing" our online courses, helping teachers begin to use iPads in their classorom, and our initial forays into app development. The connectivity is hit or miss here, with everyone occupying the bandwidth...but we're getting by!
The first breakout session I attended was Why Every Teacher Should Become an App Developer, led by Chris Thompson. Before each section of his talk, he presented a poll for participants to contribute to using texts or tweets - the real time data showed up on his inFocus. Cool feature.
He essentially went over ways to create apps: using raw code (in the case of a 14-year old who created Bubble Ball, an addicting iPhone game that was downloaded 11 million times and beat out Angry Birds for the #1 free game.
He then demonstrated a music mixer app that he created with a proprietary framework known as GameSalad, which runs on the Mac but can be used to develop apps for multiple platforms. The app involved dragging objects around, playing different sounds, and mixing multiple tunes together. Pretty impressive for something created in five minutes! Other app development tools that he mentioned are listed below.
Web App Creation Tools
Native App Generators
Native App Coding Tools
- Apple XCode
- Marmalade SDK.com
- Monotouch.net
- Appcelerator.com
- GLBasic.com
- Ansca Mobile
- Rhomobile
- Runrev.com
Non-coding Applications
One point that was raised was the importance of teaching students the fundamentals of computer science, since the field has become so integral to our daily lives. To this end, Chris runs an iPhone camp for middle and high school students that get them up and building. Apparently all of them who finished the program want to go on and continue to make apps and games.
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