Craft with Code 2: Animated Games with MIT App Inventor – Free Udemy Courses

Have you had an idea for an app and wondered what to do next? With MIT App Inventor, you can take your idea to action – no programming experience is required. It gives you building blocks that you snap together like LEGOs to build an app. You can have a basic app ready in under 30 minutes!

About App Inventor:

MIT App Inventor is the result of a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Google. It has 8.2 M users in 195 countries that have built over 34 M apps with it. Just this month has had 890.1 K active users. Applications include Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Cloud Computing.

Examples of apps built include: a pedometer app to count and report daily footsteps; an app to monitor the home garden, detect when plants need watering and irrigate them from anywhere in the world; an app that learns to play rock-paper-scissors using machine learning; the only limit is your imagination!

About the Series:

In Craft with Code, participants learn by doing, growing skills by developing apps of increasing complexity through a series of courses. I introduce a new app and show you how to build it step by step. In the process, I introduce new software concepts. You will apply the concepts to bring your ideas to life in the course project. All the code from a course is available to you to download and use in your projects.

You will need a laptop or desktop with a web browser and an Android Phone. I use a MacBook Pro with an Opera browser and a Google Pixel phone. You will need a Google account to sign up and sign in. App Inventor runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install to get started developing apps.

About this course:

In the project, you will build an animated game using Canvas and Image Sprites. You will learn essential “How To’s” of building animated games, such as: (i) How to lay out the screen with Canvas and Image Sprites (ii) How to animate a touch-sensitive Image Sprite, and (iii) How to set up a timer using a Clock for orchestration. You will then apply these concepts to bring your ideas to life in a DIY app to uplift and educate.

Credits:

I want to thank Prof. David Wolber who is my inspiration for jumping on-board MIT App Inventor and taking the technology out to others. His Course-in-a-box teaching materials are the foundation on which I built this course. And I want to thank the folks at MIT for this project.

Let’s rock and roll.