Best practices in teaching mobile application development
Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
TouchDevelop: programming cloud-connected mobile devices via touchscreen
Proceedings of the 10th SIGPLAN symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software
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From paper to computers, the way we have been writing down thoughts and performing symbolic computations has been constantly evolving. Teaching methods closely follow this trend, leveraging existing technology to make teaching more effective and preparing students for their later careers with available technologies. At present, we are in the middle of another technology shift: instead of using PCs and laptops, mobile devices are becoming more prevalent for most everyday computing tasks. We propose that computer programming, and thus the teaching of programming, can and should be done directly on the mobile devices themselves, without the need for a separate PC to write code. Programming on mobile devices engages students in new ways, allowing them to access and manipulate programmatically their most personal digital data such as pictures, videos, and music in an easy and intuitive way. The poster highlights opportunities and challenges of teaching and learning in the context of TouchDevelop, and writing programs on mobile devices in general. The poster will depict data from surveys conducted before and after class with students learning to program for the very first time. The poster will also introduce teaching and learning resources available to teachers. TouchDevelop is freely available as an app in the Windows Phone Marketplace and is supported by a book, slides, tutorials and many sample programs. See www.touchdevelop.com.