Empowering middle school students to create data-enabled social apps

MIT App Inventor has enabled middle school students to learn computing while creating their own apps-including apps that serve community needs. However, few resources exist for building apps that gather and share data. There is a need for new tools and instructional materials for students to build data-enabled, community-focused apps. We developed an extension for App Inventor, called AppVis, which allows app-makers to publish and retrieve data from our existing web-based collaborative data visualization platform. We used AppVis with supporting instructional materials in two one-week summer camps attended by a total of 33 middle school students. Based on student interview data and analysis of their final apps, we found that this approach was broadly accessible to a diverse population of students and motivated them to build apps that could be used by their own communities.