From September 4 to 7, 2023, three members of the App Inventor community—Dr. Natalie Lao, Pedro Philippi Araújo, and Daeun Yoo—were invited to share their expertise on AI education at the inaugural UNESCO Digital Learning Week in Paris, France. A reboot of UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week, Digital Learning Week is touted as the “new annual flagship event on digital learning and the transformation of education.”
Seven teachers—hailing from Malaysia, Italy, India, Brazil, and China—were recognized for their innovative use of App Inventor in educational settings. Hosted by the App Inventor Foundation, the Teacher Excellence Awards runs in conjunction with the yearly MIT App Inventor Summer Appathon.
In the training given by team members David Kim and Angie Zhou, students learned the basics of smartphone application development using the latest built-in components that can utilize generative AI, such as ChatBot and ImageBot, to create apps that talk to people or generate pictures from verbal content and more.
What if I told you that my job is to program a programming language that helps other people learn programming? Sounds meta but it’s true! I work as a software engineer on Google’s Blockly project, which is a free, open-source library for creating block-based programming languages.
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