Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) Conference Start Date: 2016, April 10 Conference End Date: 2016, April 13 Conference Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates App Inventor (AI) for Android is a block-based programming environment that enables nonprogrammers to create fully functional mobile applications for Android phones by dragging and dropping code blocks. Since the launch of AI, many improvements were applied to it, which aimed to increase its effectiveness in promoting programming education for beginners. In our workshop, which targeted high school female students, we taught mobile programming using the improved version of AI2 (a free cloud-based tool). Thus, in this paper, we will describe our experience in using AI2 in our workshop, how it helped in our teaching method and discuss the improvements and limitations we observed over the previous version of the tool. We will also show the activities provided to the students and the mobile apps that were created using AI2. The final apps as well as the survey results showed how effective was the workshop and how the improved version of AI has enhanced the teaching process.