MIT Center for Mobile Learning @ The Media Lab

Web Page: http://people.csail.mit.edu/hal/summer-of-code.html

Mailing List: http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/contact/

The Center for Mobile Learning (CML) at the MIT Media Lab invents and studies new mobile technologies to promote learning anywhere anytime for anyone.

Our Center is driven by a vision that people should be able to experience mobile technology as creators, not just consumers. One focus of our activity here is App Inventor, a Web-based program development tool that even beginners with no prior programming experience can use to create mobile applications.  App Inventor makes it easy for learners to create mobile apps for smart phones by fitting together graphical puzzle-piece programming blocks in a Web browser.

For information about the project and how to apply, and to see the application for this project, see

people.csail.mit.edu/hal/summer-of-code.html

The application period runs from March 26 to April 6.

Projects

• Adding a Maps component to the MIT App Inventor The goal of this project is to enrich the MIT App inventor by enabling users to add Google Maps to their mobile applications. Tutorials and demos will be provided to show the power and applicability of this extension.
• App Inventor Component Development Kit This tool would allow users of App Inventor to create their own components that they could upload to App Inventor and use in their projects or share. This project increases the number of developers that can contribute new features to App Inventor and make the development of App Inventor more sustainable.
• AppInventor Components to pull data feeds and display them The fact that mobile apps can consume and produce data is quite important in my opinion. Currently, working with Strings the get data out of an API or RSS feed is a bit of a messy process. Adding a component to make consuming and producing JSON easier would be a very interesting project for this summer. I have seen that the TinyWebDB Service works in a similar fashion but it adds a bit of complexity. It seems to be somehow limited by the fact that the service has to provide the data in the right structures (a custom App-Inventor-compliant API is needed to proxy requests, which sounds great in itself as a project, but might be a bit difficult for beginners). It also sounds a bit convoluted to use the TinyWebDB client to grab the data in first place. Although this is an area in which I'm certainly interested, I'd be happy to work on other parts of the project if needed.
• Creating data feed components into MIT App Inventor My proposal is described in the form I filled out at: http://people.csail.mit.edu/hal/summer-of-code.html To ensure that I am not disqualified from GSOC, I am filling out this form on Google's site as well. In case this information is not automatically included in the form, my name and email address are: Vance Turnewitsch betweenthehills@gmail.com