I teach ITIS 3150: Rapid Prototyping and Interface Building, a course I designed and implemented here at UNC Charlotte. The purpose of this hands-on class is to get students into the rhythm of rapid prototyping, introduce them to a wide variety of methods and tools, and teach them about how to use widget libraries to protoype and implement applications. The domain is general: it is not focused on desktop vs. web vs. mobile, I try to do a bit of everything. In a perfect world, this would be two separate courses, one just on prototyping and the other on interface building, but we don’t yet have the resources to do that at UNCC, so I am fitting a lot into one course. On these pages, I will describe all the rapid prototying tools I have come across, as well as some other tools that can be used for rapid prototying, and tools that can simply be used to build interfaces. Some of these I teach or have taught in the 3150 class, others I haven’t taught. I should also mention that there are no prerequisites for my course; it is open to all students from across the campus. That means that I don’t assume any programming knowledge, and I teach the students what they need to know in terms of programming. The reality is that most students coming in have at least a small amount of programming and the final interface implementation project is done in teams, so it is possible for a non-programmer to do fine in the course.

Hopefully this resource will be useful to others who are trying to figure out what Rapid Prototyping tool to use or to teach.