Computational Thinking for all through visual programming on phones

Technologies
android, java, ios, espresso
Topics
education, programming language, app development, scratch
Computational Thinking for all through visual programming on phones

The Catrobat project develops useful frameworks to create games, animations, or apps easily within a short time. This set of creativity tools for smartphones, tablets, and browsers is inspired by the well-known Scratch framework by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The motivation behind the project is that programming is an important cultural technique on the same level as mathematics and physics, from a practical as well as from a philosophical point of view. Our aim thus is to popularize the skills needed to program from an early age on in a fun and engaging way that will facilitate the spread of its adoption among young people all over the world. Our awarded Android app “Pocket Code” is currently the most famous outcome of the project. Without the need of any further devices, users have the possibility to create their first program directly on their mobile device in a “Lego-like” style with blocks in just a few steps. Pocket Code supports all common device sensors, provides special bricks for different robotic devices (Lego Mindstorms, Robotix Phiro,...) as well as for hardware devices such as the Arduino board or the Raspberry Pi, and of course offers elements of programming languages such as variables, if-statements, concurrency, etc. We also work on frameworks for other OS and on making it available on browsers. That’s why developers of different fields help us to keep our products up to date to the current needs of the users. Motivated by prizes (such as the Lovie Award, the Austrian National Innovation Award or the Re-Imagine Education Award) and being featured by different programs (like Google Play for Education or code.org) our team is working on many different subprojects and extensions which will be released in the coming years. Over 500 developers already contributed to our project on different topics such as App-Development, Web-Technologies, Graphics, Usability, Internationalization, or Design.

2018 Program

Successful Projects

Contributor
Thomas S
Mentor
Bernadette Spieler
Organization
Catrobat
Integrate Pocket Paint into Pocket Code
During the Google Summer of Code I would like to integrate Pocket Paint into Pocket code. There is quite some refactoring overhead before this can be...
Contributor
Carmen-Gabriela Popa
Mentor
caldrian, Michael Herold
Organization
Catrobat
iOS: Device Sensors and Code Refactoring
Device sensors have different ways of functioning, depending on the operating system. This being stated, I will improve the existent code by...
Contributor
Thomas Schranz
Mentor
Robert Painsi
Organization
Catrobat
Introduce Architecture and Separate Components
An open source software project should allow everyone to participate. Inherently this can cause the project to grow over the boundaries of its...
Contributor
Thomas Hirsch
Mentor
Christian Schindler, Annemarie
Organization
Catrobat
Refactoring - Testable code, simplify existing unit tests, enhance test coverage
Theres about 1100+ occurences of “.getInstance()” methods accessing singletons from all over the project. (eg. ProjectManager, StorageHandling,...
Contributor
Gajendra Tanwar
Mentor
Matthias Mueller, Wolfgang Slany
Organization
Catrobat
Google blockly integration to catrobat project
Google Blockly is a library for building visual programming editors.It is increasingly being used as a platform for visual programming languages such...