Xinyue Deng
MIT EECS — Foxconn Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar
Developing MIT App Inventor to include gesture recognition
2015–2016
Harold Abelson
MIT App Inventor is a blocks-based programming tool that allows everyone, even novices, to start programming and build fully functional apps for Android devices. Newcomers to App Inventor can have their first app up and running in an hour or less, and can program more complex apps in significantly less time than with more traditional, text-based languages. Currently, it can support lots of basic functions, but we want to explore more possibilities. My project is building an extension for App Inventor to enable it recognize gestures, and even learn gestures from users. This component should be easy to use by novices. Furthermore, we will explore possibilities in building apps with gesture recognition for education.
App Inventor is designed to inspire teenagers to be interested in computer science. It is exciting to show young people what technology can do without having them struggling with code. I am glad that I can be part of this group. In the past, I have done Java development, and machine learning related projects, which could help me in this project.