Novice programming environments (NPEs) like Scratch and Alice witnessed tremendous growth in adoption and popularity in recent years. These NPEs have successfully lowered the barrier of initial entry to programming. They have also allowed novice computing students to exercise their creative freedom more meaningfully by enabling them to work on projects which have more real life context.Recent trends in adoption of smartphone and other mobile devices among our youth points to a time in near future when majority of them will be mobile device users. Hence, if the NPEs want to remain relevant among youth, they need to adapt to and cater to a mobile-device centric audience. Google and MIT's App Inventor for Android is one of the early NPEs that is trying to achieve this by offering a Scratch-like environment for mobile apps development. GameSalad is another free software primarily for Mac platform that can also offers a drag-n-drop rule-based environment for creating apps. In this paper we compare these two environments' suitableness for computing introduction. Our comparison is based on several logistical, instructional, and operational factors and points to the fact that both these mobile NPEs have their strong points as well as weaknesses. We believe the effectiveness and success of these mobile NPEs will vary depending on particular situations, and hence our work will aid someone looking for a mobile NPE in making a more judicious choice.

In cloud computing consumers often seek some assurance from cloud service providers (CSPs) that services will be provided according to consumers' requirements. The "service-level-agreement" (SLA) between a CSP and a consumer solves this issue to an extent and provides some level of assurance. However, SLAs alone do not solve the issue entirely as there is no unique rule to create an SLA. They vary in description, length, and types of information released. Therefore, consumers need a better way of estimating 'trustworthiness' of a cloud (CSP). In this work we propose a framework to alleviate the above issue. Our framework estimates trustworthiness of a cloud using a quantitative model of trust. We identified and formalized several parameters that can be extracted from SLA or retrieved during the sessions and are used to estimate trust.

Google's App Inventor for Android (AIA) is the newest visual "blocks" programming language designed to introduce students to programming through creation of mobile applications (apps). AIA opens up the world of mobile apps to novice programmers. Success stories of using AIA to introduce college students to programming exist.We used AIA in computing summer camps for high school students that we offer at our university. This paper is an experience report about using AIA in our camps. We provide a detailed description of designing our camps with AIA including the process of selecting and setting-up an Android device and instructional materials that we developed and made available to everyone. We evaluated our camps through surveys to determine the effects on the students. We found that there was mostly a slight increase in the favorable disposition towards computing. We also share our successes with using AIA and what still needs improvement for wider use.

App Inventor is one of the most popular blockbased programming environments. Currently, there are limited instructional resources that guide students to create tangible apps using App Inventor. In this positional statement we make a case for the need for more App Inventor instructional resources related to tangible apps. We also present our proposal to address this need.

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