Designing and Testing a Mobile Creative Coding Application for Children

Abstract

Children are becoming increasingly engaged with applications on mobile phones. They use mobile apps to socialize, communicate, and play games. There is an opportunity to channel this familiarity and fascination with mobile phones in order to introduce children to computational thinking and creative expression. Towards that end, the Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) Group is designing a free mobile application that will provide a motivating, creative, and accessible way for children to learn how to code through creating interactive animations that they can send to friends and family. This thesis identifies key design questions and challenges involved in the design of this new coding platform for children, reviews the strategies other mobile applications have employed in addressing related design challenges, and introduces a variety of solutions that our research team has developed, along with their affordances and limitations. This thesis also presents an analysis of data from conducting playtests and semi-structured interviews, and suggests lessons learned for other designers of mobile coding applications for children.