Creating a a mobile app

For this assignment, I was tasked with learning how to build a mobile app via MIT's App Inventor Interface. We weren't necessarily tasked with create an app that was directly related to our watershed (as that would require extensive involvement into a pseudo-programming atmosphere), but we were to experiment with a few app tutorials and try a basic app.

As an avid fan of mini golf, I chose to do the mini golf application tutorial (initially the ball bounce tutorial). The video was very short, and gave the basic information, but I decided to go a little deeper into the more in depth tutorial on the mini golf app to see what that entailed.

A quick disclaimer: I had lots of difficult setting up the emulator (required if you don't have an android phone that can download MITs aiStarter). It seemed it didn't worked right at the beginning, but restarting my computer seemed to help.

The programming interface was relatively intuitive. I took a basic programming course in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. For whatever reason, that's as far as I took it, and never continued with programming. As a professional, I use microsoft excel and formulas within excel quite extensively. I also recently took a Microsoft Access course for database management but I don't think I will be learning to program access in any amount of depth - it is very involved, people spend years learning access. I've also started to learn R for data management, but that may be another that I don't get too involved in. I like R for it's ability to replicate manipulation of data. For example, if I needed to perform an annual accounting document from a license sales file, with proper R code, I can spit out a report with the relevant data I need from a larger dataset with just a click of a button, rather than recoding it every time in excel.

Back to the MIT App Inventor

So I was able to replicate the minigolf game through the first 3 steps (it's basically just following along a PDF guide). I mostly had success, with some minor errors that I couldn't figure out. Below is the game with the mobile emulator (right) and the programming on the left.

I thought the programming side of things was relatively easy to replicate, however more time would be needed (maybe a semester long course, or lots of spare time) in order to be able to successfully create my own app from scratch. It does seem intuitive, but that's also because I was just replicating their example. I think to learn this well, one would need to do each of their examples to their full extent, as I'd imagine they cover each of the "Components" throughout those tutorials. 

Occasionally, the PC emulator wouldn't incorporate the changes I made on the programming side, so I would have to just shut it and reconnect via the website and it worked fine.

Thinking about the simplicity of this app but the amount of 'programming' required - mainly just lines of nested code - I'd imagine it would be extremely time consuming to make an app that had multiple purposes.