Lesson Overview

This unit teaches students about creating procedures and playing music in an app. The objective is to create an app with piano keys that the user can press to play musical notes. The "MyPiano" unit emphasizes an iterative and incremental approach, where students start with one note and then gradually add more notes to their apps. Procedures, which are a crucial part of abstraction and modularization, will also be introduced. Students will write a procedure for playing a note and then use the same procedure for playing the other notes. This will enable them to reuse the code for each subsequent key on the piano app they create.

Learning Objectives

• Upon completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. Develop a piano app using the App Inventor Blocks Editor.
2. Apply computational thinking practices, such as being incremental and iterative, to develop and test an app in stages.
3. Reuse code within an app.
4. Demonstrate abstraction by creating and implementing procedures in App Inventor.
5. Test and debug an app using the MIT AI2 Companion.
6. Increase their positive perception of programming by creating a useful and enjoyable app.

Lesson Plan

Activity

🔽 Introduction to MyPiano Project

• Demonstrate the finished MyPiano app and tell students that they will be making their own piano apps.

🔽 Coding Activity 1: Designer Section

• Introduction to Layout Components: Demonstrate HorizontalArrangements and VerticalArrangements so students understand how they can help to determine the layout of an app. Components inside VerticalArrangements are placed below each other. That is also the default behavior in App Inventor. Components placed inside HorizontalArrangements appear side by side.

  1. VerticalArrangement with 2 HorizontalArrangements inside.

1. HorizontalArrangement with 2 VerticalArrangements inside.