Educators are often seeking new ways to motivate or inspire students to learn. Our past efforts in K-12 outreach included robotics and media computation as the contexts for teaching Computer Science (CS). With the deep interest in mobile technologies among teenagers, our recent outreach has focused on using smartphones as a new context. This paper is an experience report describing our approach and observations from teaching a summer camp for high school students using App Inventor (AI). The paper describes two separate methods (one using a visual block language, and another using Java) that were taught to high school students as a way to create Android applications. We observed that initiating the instruction with the block language, and then showing the direct mapping to an equivalent Java version, assisted students in understanding app development in Java. Our evaluation of the camp includes observations of student work and artifact assessment of student projects. Although the assessment suggests the camp was successful in several areas, we present numerous lessons learned based on our own reflection on the camp content and instruction.

Although Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) often improve usability, individuals with physical disabilities may be unable to use a mouse and keyboard to navigate through a GUI-based application. In such situations, a Vocal User Interface (VUI) may be a viable alternative. Existing vocal tools (e.g., Vocal Joystick) can be integrated into software applications; however, integrating an assistive technology into a legacy application may require tedious and manual adaptation. Furthermore, the challenges are deeper for an application whose GUI changes dynamically (e.g., based on the context of the program) and evolves with each new application release. This paper provides a discussion of challenges observed while mapping a GUI to a VUI. The context of the authors' examples and evaluation are taken from Myna, which is the VUI that is mapped to the Scratch programming environment. Initial user studies on the effectiveness of Myna are also presented in the paper.

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