GSoD 2020

MIT App Inventor has applied to participate in Google Season of Docs 2020. MIT App Inventor is a platform for anyone in the world to realize their app ideas, and used primarily for computer science education. It is used by over 8 million users annually in almost every country. As part of Google Season of Docs, we are looking forward to improving the accessibility of our platform through working with technical writers.

To contact us about Google Season of Docs, please email gsod-2020appinventor.mit.edu.

Potential Projects

Project Title: Create high-level overview of new App Inventor components, such as Map and CloudDB.
Description: The MIT App Inventor team continues to provide new functionality to the platform. Some of these newer features provide more advanced concepts and good example tutorials presenting the new concepts and how they are combined with the existing App Inventor functionality are required. This project will review the newer technologies incorporated into the project and write new tutorials to present them to novice users.

Project Title: Document differences in App Inventor Android and iOS, and present strategies for compensating for these differences.
Description: As we prepare for the release of MIT App Inventor for iOS, we need to thoroughly document additional limitations on projects for iOS, and how existing projects might be adapted to work on both platform reliable with examples.

Project Title: Redesign/reimagine the App Inventor reference documentation
Description: The reference documentation for MIT App Inventor is presented in a style similar to Javadocs with technical language descriptions for functionality but not necessarily a significant set of approachable examples of how to use a particular feature in a broader context. This project would allow us to explore ways to improve or replace the existing documentation, preferably in a way that would also benefit our non-English speaking users.

Project Title: Improve the contributor getting started instructions
Description: The build system for App Inventor is complex and continues to evolve as the Android and iOS development environments evolve. This results in a divergence in how the build system works and the existing documentation. This project will revisit the existing contributor documentation and update it to reflect changes to the build system.

Project Title: Write new tutorials for existing educational projects
Description: The MIT App Inventor has an existing suite of tutorial projects at various difficulty levels that explore a variety of concepts. The projects tend to be solid, but the tutorials themselves are often confusing. Some feature code with bugs. These tutorials need to be rewritten, many of them from the ground up, to meet their education goals while finding and correcting any errors.