Ever wanted to make your own application, but been afraid to because you don’t speaker computer? Then this latest project from Google could make you very happy. App Inventor for Android allows you to build just about any app you can imagine and not just games: quiz apps for friends, study apps for students, you can even use Android’s text-to-speech capabilities to get the phone to ask you questions aloud.

App Inventor requires zero programming knowledge and rather than requiring written code, instead allows you to design applications using a lego-like visual system. The App Inventor authors have created blocks for just about everything you can do with an Android phone, as well as blocks for doing “programming like” stuff, for instance, block that store information, blocks for repeating actions, and blocks to perform actions under certain conditions.

App Inventor for Android was made possible by significant prior research in educational computing and work done by Google on online environments for development. The educational thrust of this research, and the App Inventor project holds that programming can be vehicle for engaging powerful ideas through active learning.