Abstractionless Programming in App Inventor

The blocks programming language MIT App Inventor allows people of all ages to program Android apps, however past studies have shown that these programmers do not typically use procedures. In this paper, an analysis shows that many of the opportunities for abstraction involve a difficult concept in App Inventor, generics. We make the hypothesis that this is the main reason for App Inventor programmers’ lack of abstractions, and recommend that more work be done to teach App Inventor programmers about generics.