App Inventor

David Wolber is the Chair of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. David teaches App Inventor in his Computing, Robots, and the WebA" course at USF. The apps created by his students- mostly humanities and business majors with no prior programming experience-have been chronicled in articles of the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Tech Crunch, Fortune.CNN.com, and Yahoo news. David began teaching App Inventor as part of Google's 2009 pilot program involving ten universities. In 2010, he received a grant from Google to work with the App Inventor team and authored the advanced tutorials that appear on the App Inventor site. He is currently writing a book on App Inventor along with Hal Abelson that will be published by O'Reilly in Spring 2011. Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. Abelson was recipient in 1992 of the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award). Abelson is also the winner of the 1995 Taylor L. Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Research Alliance in Eductional Technology, co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology, and serves on the steering committee of the HP-MIT Alliance. In these capacities, he played key roles in fostering MIT institutional educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare and DSpace. He also consults to HP Laboratories in the area of digital information systems. Abelson has a broad interest in information technology and policy, and developed and teaches the MIT course Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier. He is a founding director of Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and he was a founding director of the Free Software Foundation. Together, these three organizations are devoted to strengthing our intellectual commons. Abelson has a longstanding interest in using computation as a conceptual framework in teaching. He directed the first implementation of Logo for the Apple Computer, which made the language widely available on personal computers beginning in 1981; and published a widely selling book on Logo in 1982. His book Turtle Geometry, written with Andrea diSessa in 1981, presented a computational approach to geometry has been cited as "the first step in a revolutionary change in the entire teaching/learning process." Ellen Spertus is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mills College, where she has taught with App Inventor, and a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where she was one of the App Inventor developers. She and her work have been written about in Wired, USA Today (which described her as "a geek with principles"), and in The New York Times (as one of three "women who might change the face of the computer industry"). In addition to her many technical publications, her writings have appeared in the book She's Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff and in the magazines Technology Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Odyssey: Adventures in Science, and Glamour. Liz Looney is a senior software engineer at Google, where she helped develop App Inventor and is a member of the Robotics Task Force. She has over 20 years of experience in creating programming tools and holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from The University of New Hampshire.