Trinity College offered an edX course featuring part of the Mobile CSP curriculum. The course, Mobile Computing with App Inventor – CS Principles, was a good first MOOC experience.
The 6-week course featured five apps, one per week, followed by a week for students to design and create their own app:
- Week 1, Hello World App. A crowd-sourcing app that we’ll use to post a greeting on a Google map shared with all members of the course.
- Week 2, Slide Show App. An app that uses the device’s camera to create an editable slide show of our favorite photographs.
- Week 3, Walking Tour. A location-aware app that guides the user through a custom-designed tour.
- Week 4, Message Hub. A social app that helps organize friends and family members into a communication hub.
- Week 5, Game of Nim. A two-person strategy game where the user matches wits against the computer.
- Week 6, Build your Own. Apply what you’ve learned to build a mobile app of your own design.
Some Statistics
More than 15,000 students “enrolled” in the course. A total of 224 students enrolled for verified certificates. Here’s the breakdown of “active participants” per week, which is fairly typical of a free MOOC:
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 |
| 3,638 (28.3%) | 2,886 (21.6%) | 2,259 (16.7%) | 2.203 (15.7%) | 2,039 (14.1%) | 1,603 (10.9%) |
Around 540 students took the final exam and 252 submitted their final app project for peer review.
The course is currently “archived,” which means it’s still open and available for free. And there is talk about possibly doing a follow-up course in spring 2016.