Teaching programming on a mobile device
Nikolai Tillmann, Judith Bishop · 2012
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.