Flow Charting App Inventor Tutorials
Students design and create flow charts for the MIT App Inventor tutorials in this computer science activity about program analysis. In program analysis, which is based on determining the behavior of computer programs, flow charts are an important tool for tracing control flow. Control flow is a graphical representation of the logic present in a program and how the program works. Students work through tutorials, design and create flow charts about how the tutorials function, and present their findings to the class. In their final assessment, they create an additional flow chart for an advanced App Inventor tutorial. This activity prepares students with the knowledge and skills to use App Inventor in the future to design and create Android applications.
Students at work on App Inventor tutorials.Copyright 2012 Rich Powers, University of Nebraska-Omaha
Software engineers perform program analysis routinely in their work. Program analysis has many valuable applications, which include determining program correctness and program optimization. This lesson, with its focus on flow charting, relates to the program correctness aspect of program analysis. Creating flow charts to determine how and why a program behaves the way it does is one way to implement the software/system design cycle, comparable to the engineering design process. The process of creating flow charts relies on the analysis, design and testing steps in these cyclical and iterative processes.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Design an accurate flow chart.
- Test a flow chart to determine its accuracy and correctness.
- Explain how flow charts are used as a tool to design and analyze computer programs.