App Inventor finally came to Tokyo!! First App Inventor workshop for educators in Tokyo

Oct 10, 2019 karen's Blog


This is a guest blog by MIT Master Trainer Masao Ishihara.

On September 4th, the first MIT App Inventor workshop for educators was held at STEMON head learning studio in Ogikubo, Tokyo. The workshop was planned and run by Masao Ishihara, the first MIT Master Trainer in Educational Mobile Computing in Japan. The training was supported by STEMON, one of Japan’s leading STEM after school programs. The workshop’s objective was to introduce App Inventor, a powerful tool for all to design and deliver solutions to real life problems using a sophisticated programming environment for mobile devices.

All eleven participants teach STEM subjects at public schools and private STEM after school programs. Some has just started learning programming in Scratch; some are experienced and advanced instructors in programming. In fact, one of the participants teaches children Robotics and won championship awards in many international competitions including FIRST LEGO LEAGUE.

students at Tokyo workshop

The workshop covers a brief introduction of educational framework and recent research in Computational Thinking, Computer Science Education, and related topics including Design Thinking. Also, an important educational philosophy “Constructionism” was introduced which is the foundation for App Inventor and many other educational tools and projects.

The hands on part of the workshop covers the following:

The 3 and a half hour training went very well and participants gained a good understanding of the basics of App Inventor along with their own ideas of potential use of the tool in their own classroom.

More training in App Inventor will be held as follows:

Other workshop reports and future workshops and training information is available at Masao’s blog: http://emcs.blog

Please contact Masao for further information on App Inventor training and workshops in Japan at the following email: mailto:mdstorm@me.com