Keep Calm and Code on Your Phone: A Pilot of SuaCode, an Online Smartphone-Based Coding Course

Abstract

Africa lags behind the rest of the world in terms of digital literacy skills with less than one percent of African children leaving school with basic coding skills. One cause of this gap is poor access to equipment such as computers for teaching and learning. Yet, there is a proliferation of smartphones in Africa. Seeking to leverage this opportunity, we developed SuaCode, an online smartphone-based coding course to teach programming fundamentals to Africans. We designed the course to teach coding in a visual, interactive and fun way through the building of a pong game using Processing (a Java-based programming language). In this work, we describe our experience delivering the course online to 30 Ghanaian high school and college students. At the end of the course, 7 of the 30 students completed the first part of the course, building the pong game. The reflection essays from our students showed that they enjoyed the course and coding on a smartphone was not a barrier to completing the assignments. Improvements such as having more mentors and automated feedback on the coding assignments will improve the quality of the course. Given the difficulty in accessing computers in Africa, our work shows that smartphones can be leveraged to effectively introduce students to programming concepts via an online course. We are excited about the results of this pilot and see the potential to scale the course to eventually bring coding skills within arm's reach of millions across Africa, literally into their palms thereby bridging Africa's digital divide.