MIT App Inventor team hosts workshop with Phillips Exeter summer program for educators

On June 25, the MIT App Inventor team welcomed 35 teachers from the Phillips Exeter summer program for educators (Teaching in the Age of AI) at the MIT Stata Center. 

Teachers came from all over the country, most with twenty-plus years of experience as educators, though a majority of them had never done any coding before.  We had them code our "Gen AI Vision Aid" app, where an LLM is used to analyze images and verbally describe objects and the surroundings for a visually impaired person. The teachers did an amazing job, and everyone successfully completed their apps. We got great feedback from the teachers and we look forward to more collaborations with the Phillips Exeter team.

MIT App Inventor team members at the workshop included David Kim, Robert Parks, Evan Patton, Jeff Schiller, Cindy Bishop, Jennet Zamanova, Natalie Lao, Cindy Rosenthal, Marisol Diaz, and Selim Tezel.

Here’s what a few of them had to say afterward:

“...loved this- I would love to bring this back to my engineering classroom.”

“Great hands-on presentation on how to use MIT App Inventor for people with little to no coding experience (like me!). I can see a number of educational applications for projects, but also for me to solve problems in my classroom.”

“I teach humanities, so I'm not quite sure how to integrate app building into my curriculum, but I'm grateful for the experience - it helps make me more culturally literate :)”

“This was an amazing workshop! Thank you so much for this awesome and empowering presentation!”