Creating Mobile Applications with Artificial Intelligence Adopting Computational Action

Teaching computing through hands-on activities, where students develop their own mobile applications infused with Artificial Intelligence, serves as a multifaceted learning experience. This approach not only helps them to learn algorithms and programming, user interface design, and Artificial Intelligence concepts but also to develop creativity. By embracing a computational action approach, students are empowered to envision their own application adopting design thinkingDesign thinking practices. In this regard, this chapter introduces a course systematically developed following an instructional design process. The course was applied and evaluated in an extracurricular setting with 40 underprivileged Brazilian public middle and high school students aged 14–22 years. Our results based on 11 completed projects indicate that the educational strategy as adopted in the course can have a positive impact on student learning, learning experience and the students motivation. Furthermore, adopting an interest-driven creator theory helps to keep students engaged in creating AI-powered applications that are especially original in terms of their topics and tags. On the other hand, average performance results related to the learning of algorithm and programming, as well as user interface design concepts also points out the need for more time and emphasis on this content to allow students to enhance creativity related to these concepts.