From home appliances to wearable accessories, the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has given way to a growing need for mobile applications that can control, communicate, and connect these “smart” devices together. However, building such applications requires a considerable amount of work, not to mention programming skills. Thus, this project aims to make the mobile app development efforts for IoT easier and more accessible by using MIT App Inventor. Unlike traditional programming languages, MIT App Inventor is a blocks-based interface that enables all users, even novice programmers, to create their own mobile applications by simply dragging and dropping selected components. This will solve the problem of slow mobile app delivery for IoT due to limited resources.

Last year, I was a UROP student with MIT App Inventor, where I worked on internationalization and back-end development. With this Super UROP, I hope to explore more of App Inventor’s capabilities as well as show others, especially younger students, how easy it is to develop applications. I think that being able to develop applications is a valuable experience with the increased use of mobile technologies.