Hal Abelson, director of the MIT App Inventor team, has led the project from the US side. App Inventor was inaccessible in China because it runs on Google infrastructure, so Hal, Jeff Schiller, Weihua Li, Andrew McKinney, and others facilitated the creation of a version that runs on a different infrastructure and thus can be accessed in China.īut this was only the start. Thanks to the efforts of the extended MIT App Inventor team and some extraordinary educators in China, this creative way of teaching computational thinking is now also taking off in China. While App Inventor education has rapidly expanded in the US since its inception at Google in 2009, it has been widely unavailable in China. MIT App Inventor is the catalyst of change, a coding language perfectly suited for teaching and inspiring young people to learn how to create and solve problems in our rapidly digitizing world. What better agent than education to illustrate the amazing commonalities between peoples? This is a story, instead, of collaboration, the story of US and Chinese citizens uniting for the common goal of better educating students for the 21st century. There are many stories about competition and strife in US-China relations, as well as the profound differences in our cultures.