No Text

CPSC 110-08: Computing on Mobile Phones
Spring 2012

No Text While Driving Tutorial
Due: March 12, before class

CS Principles

This activity addresses the idea that computing is a creative activity and focuses on the following learning objectives:

1: The student can use computing tools and techniques to create artifacts.
3: The student can use computing tools and techniques for creative expression.
4: The student can use programming as a creative tool.

Preliminaries

This lesson assumes your phone has the ability to send and receive text messages. The phones for the CPSC-110 should all contain pre-paid SIM cards, which may or may not still have available minutes.

This lesson introduces a number of new App Inventor components:

Texting: This component processes incoming and outgoing text messages.
TinyDB: This component allows us to store the automatic response in a persistent database.

Reading Assignment

Read Chapter 4 of App Inventor, No Texting While Driving (17 pages). This chapter walks you through the creation of a simple though useful texting app. It is NOT necessary to implement the app for this homework. We will do that in class. Although, if you want to get a head start, feel free to implement the app.

Portfolio Page

Create a page for this homework under you Homework tab and post a write up of the No Texting App on that page. Address the following questions:

What does the Next Texting app do and do you think it is a socially useful app?
What are two event handlers that are associated with the Texting component and what do they do?
What does the TinyDb component do and what is the difference between storing data in a TinyDb and storing data in a global variable?
Describe how to add comments to you blocks in the blocks editor.

In Class