Writing and connecting IoT and mobile applications in MIT App Inventor

As the "Internet of Things" (IoT) grows and becomes more prevalent in society, it is important that everyone is able to understand and take advantage of IoT technology. I present the IoT Embedded Companion, a system integrated with MIT App Inventor that allows users to design and program IoT applications alongside a mobile app. This system uses the same block-based programming language as MIT App Inventor and includes live development features that allow users to see changes to their application in real-time while it runs on the mobile device and IoT device. The resulting projects consist of a mobile application and autonomous IoT program that together create the IoT application. Both the mobile app and the IoT program share global variables that either system can read and write, allowing the components to act together as a single application. In addition to writing the IoT Embedded Companion, I designed a curriculum for a workshop to teach and test the IoT Embedded Companion targeting middle-school aged students and held two iterations of the workshop. My findings indicate that students as young as middle school level are able to understand the concepts of IoT and that learning about it expands their knowledge of computing capabilities.

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

2018

Author dc:creator

• Hendrickson, Kathryn Elizabeth

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/1721.1/119767

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119767