Understanding App Inventor forums

MIT App Inventor is a visual blocks language that allows users to create mobile applications for Android. App Inventor users have the option of posting in a public support forum to discuss anything from specific programming issues to education issues. In order to leverage the information on the forums to improve App Inventor, we must first understand what is being discussed. In this thesis, we used unsupervised machine learning methods to automate discovery of discussion topics. First, we transformed posts into feature vectors using a bag-of-words model. Next, we clustered posts using k-means clustering and evaluated our results both quantitatively, by calculating the average silhouette of the posts, and qualitatively, by simply looking at the clusters of posts. Finally, we used LDA topic modeling to determine the topics being discussed and compared the extracted topic words to a manual evaluation of each cluster. Using this technique, we were able to uncover common problems with App Inventor that users encountered. We hope to use this information to improve users' experience with App Inventor.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Tsai, Sylvan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hal Abelson.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106386

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/106386