My app is an educational app intended for speech therapy. This app is a digital resource for both therapists and parents that focuses on the foundational skills of speaking and writing. The first exercise is the Oral Motor Mamas, which are illustrations that strengthens oral motor muscles. Students will imitate the cartoon’s face, moving their lips and tongue accordingly. These exercises are perfect for a student who has apraxia, autism, or speech delays. The second part of the app is a drawing exercise that displays outlines of the alphabet. Students will recite their ABCs and develop their fine motor skills.

I enjoyed building the app. At the start of the project, I was unsure of how I would deliver the resources effectively. I drew inspiration and knowledge from the President’s Quiz and Paint Pot assignments. I had trouble with the ABC exercises because of the Next Button. Debugging this issue and testing my app allowed me to troubleshoot and learn more about the MIT App Inventor.

This week I submitted my proposal for my final app, Young Lits. This app is an educational app targeted to toddlers to promote early literacy and oral skills. The app has two parts ABC practice and oral motor exercises. The initial part, the ABC practice, will help the learners practice writing their ABCs and developing their motor skills. The second part of the app includes images that I have created in Adobe Illustrator that illustrates the cartoon with several mouth positions. These positions vary in tongue position and mouth opening. These various positions will strengthen the child’s oral motor muscles needed to produce all the sounds in the English language. I am excited to use all the knowledge I have acquired over the past ten weeks and create something of my own. My focus will be to keep the user interface simple to avoid confusing the young learner, but attractive to draw and keep their attention.

This week I learned several different behaviors and components to develop a quiz about the irregular plural quiz. To make the digital assessment, I had to define list variables to store the questions and answers, sequence through a list using an index, display the next problem when the user clicks next and display a label using conditional behaviors. The quiz has five questions. The directions are displayed above the image, and the user must enter the correct plural form of the image and word provided. This week was fun, and I have been looking forward to learn how to display labels when the user gets an answer right wrong. I think I will use that behavior in the future.

This week, I created a perfect app for car owners. The productivity app saves the location of the user’s car, and when the user is ready to return the app provides directions via Google Maps. My customizations of the app were focused on my user interface design. In honor of the Laker championship, I chose a purple and gold color theme with a black background. I like to make productivity apps because they are very simple, but extremely useful. To complete this assignment I used familiar components, such as, the LocationSensor component the TinyDB and the WebViewer.

The original Map Tour example from MIT App Inventor was a virtual tour of Paris’s main attractions. Rather than do a tour about tourist attractions, I created a map tour for three museums in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California is known for Hollywood and its great weather. However, as LA native I take pride in the diversity of the city. The map tour highlights three ethnic museums: Japanese American National Museum, African American California Museum, and Southwest Museum of the American Indian.

The most significant component I learned about this week is the web viewer. When the user selects the museum they would like to visit, the wikipedia page of the museum is displayed on the lower half of the screen. The immediate access to a web page is a very useful component when creating an app that is created for informational purposes. I can definitely see myself using the web viewer in the future for another project.

The Chase is a game where the user is a ladybug, whose movement is controlled by tilting the device. The objective of the game is to make the lady bug chase and eat aphids to gain energy. There is a red line on the bottom of the screen that keeps track of the lady bug’s energy . The user must also avoid the frog because it wants to eat the lady bug.

During this week I learned many new behaviors. I learned how to use the Orientation Sensor to control an image sprite, dictate events using the clock and create procedures with parameters. This was a challenging week, because my device did not respond well to the tilting. I enjoyed learning different behaviors and components, but I am not sure how to put an educational twist on this game.

This week’s assignment has been the most challenging so far. This app was challenging to create because it required very minimal user interface elements and more code blocks. This week I focused on the design elements of the user interface to customize my application.

This week I think it was great to create an app that can save lives—texting while driving is dangerous. I played on the theme of driving when I chose my background. I used the TinyDB database component to keep any customized messages the user inputs. The initial screen is set to load the last custom response input. I like a clean user interface, so the custom message box is hidden when the screen initializes. When the user clicks the edit icon on the home screen, the custom text box becomes available. I also added the Text To Speech component to read out loud the incoming message and phone number. I learned a lot of new behaviors and components during this lesson.

This week’s assignment, I wanted to integrate the Whack a Mole game into an educational game. My audience is first graders, and the target goal is to recall vowels. I labeled the holes with vowels, so while the child plays the game, they are always viewing the vowels. The use of this app will help the child identify and recite vowels. The user receives points when they touch the mole in the vowel hole. The phone will vibrate for 500 milliseconds. I changed the background to green and used Adobe Illustrator to add vowels below the hole image I found online. I also set the screen to initialize block to have the mole move between the five holes when the application starts.

The APK can be found here.

Scan code to play on Android device.

The Paint application is the classic PC application from my childhood. This week I created a painting application using a transparent image of a Hello Kitty. The user can choose between five colors. These can also take a image on their device and draw on the image. This week I learned how to adjust the color of a button when clicked. I also learned how to create a spectrum by replacing a button with a slider. I can see myself using many of these features in the future, because many children enjoy coloring. This drawing feature can help children identify colors and develop their fine motor skills.