Mobile Apps Lecture in the Campus Visit attracts many high school students

At the campus visit to Kanagawa Institute of Technology (in Japan) that was held this summer (on August 18, 2018), Department of Information and Computer Sciences opened a lecture on application development for smartphones. Approximately 40 high school students participated and experienced application development using MIT App Inventor. Most of them use smartphones, but have little experience in computer programming. For such students as well, it is aimed to have experiences that using App Inventor can develop quite sophisticated applications.  With this as a trigger, we hope that many of them will head to the fields of computer science and computer engineering in the future.

The following three subjects were prepared:

Experience of image recognition by artificial intelligence

Shoot something interesting with a smartphone camera and send the image to Microsoft's Image Recognizer. Normally, in several seconds to several tens of seconds, the result of recognition of the image (what is shown, what kind of situation it is, etc.) is returned as a short English sentence. The student evaluates the recognition result (with max 100 points). Furthermore, comments such as which is good or bad are also given. By pressing a button, they can store and share the screen shot of the screen including the evaluation result into the Dropbox.

Your high school building emerges by scraping the screen

Given the student's high school name (or place name) and press the button, the corresponding building appears on the Google Maps. But as soon it disappears, the screen gets darker (filled with gray). But do not worry, rub your screen with your fingers as if rubbing with a coin. Then the school building will gradually appear again.

Reproduction of actual traveling locus at Suzuka Circuit

Our University Solar Car actually ran the Suzuka Circuit at the race. By using the trajectory data (latitude and longitude taken every 5 seconds) , the running is reproduced. The latitude and longitude are converted to the coordinates of the smartphone screen. Latitude, longitude, elapsed time, current speed (approximate), etc. are displayed every moment. It can be confirmed that it is fast in the straight part and slower near the hairpin. You can also display it faster or slower than the actual time.

On this day, starting from scratch, they first worked on simple exercises. The actual material used is the second one (Your high school building emerges by scraping the screen). However, because they have not enough time, they cannot accomplish this from scratch. So we prepared semi-finished products so that they could complete it by adding some processing (block) to it. Many students completed the targeted application. They are expected to go home with this and review it again. Furthermore, based on that, we hope that they will create a program to solve the problem they found themselves.

In this lecture, we targeted only Android. Many participants brought their own Android, but to the participants who did not, the organizer lent Android terminal. However, nearly one third of the participants have also found that they usually use iPhone. Currently, iOS version of MIT App Inventor is under development. In addition, Thunkable already released cross platform ThunkableX (iOS + Android). In the near future, we intend to prepare lectures for iOS version as well.