Group collaboration with App Inventor

Collaboration becomes increasingly important in programming as projects become more complex. With traditional text-based programming languages, programmers typically use a source code management system to manage the code, merge code from multiple authors, and optionally lock files for conflict-free editing. There is a limited corpus of work around collaborative editing of code in visual programming languages such as block-based programming. I present a collaborative programming environment to MIT App Inventor, a web-based visual platform for building Android applications with blocks, which enables many programmers to collaborate in real time on the same MIT App Inventor project. I design and implement three collaboration models to evaluate the efficacy of these different collaborative models for users of App Inventor so as to understand which approach best enables collaboration. Our results demonstrate that real-time programming decreases the completion time of a task, improves the interaction between users, and increases users' likeability towards collaborative programming. I anticipate that this new collaborative programming environment will change the way users use MIT App Inventor, and more curriculum based on the collaborative tools will be designed.

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

2017

Author dc:creator

• Deng, Xinyue, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Harold Abelson.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written 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/1721.1/112839

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112839