Abstract:

Coding has been recognized by educators to be a fundamental skill for everybody. The awarness campaigns launched worldwide in the last years, like Computer Science Education Week and Europe Code Week, have attracted the attention of media and initiated many people of all ages to programming. The availability of online visual programming platforms (like Scratch and Blockly) and freely accessible playful educational tools (like the ones offered by Code.org) have significantly contributed to lower the access barrier to coding, making it possible to acquire computational thinking skills while playing, with no need to study the syntax of any programming language.

The widespread diffusion of internet connected objects with embedded processors has added to the power of coding, making it the essential skill that allows us to exploit the unprecedented potential of all the smart objects around us. Nowadays, online visual programming platforms for mobile applications make it possible to use block-based programming to develop full fledged mobile applications, thus combining the immediacy of visual programming with the attractiveness of mobile applications.

A pan European crowdcoding educational experiment was launched in October 2014, during Europe Code Week 2014, to involve people with no programming skills into the development of a new mobile game for Android, called Flagship, to be officially released by the European Commission to promote computer literacy. The specifications were disclosed at the beginning of codeweek and the fist full fledged version was released on the last day, as a result of an international coding relay race involving more than 500 people from 38 countries. The University of Urbino took care of merging all the contributions and conducting the live coding sessions corresponding to the milestones of the roadmap. AppInventor was adopted as a development platform in order to make all coding steps accessible to neophytes.
Programming phases was streamed live and recorder. Both the video logs and the incremental AppInventor project files were made available online to be used as tutorials.

This paper reports all the details of the crowdcoding experiment, discusses motivations and results, points out the main strengths and weaknesses, and outlines the current status and future directions of the Flagship project.

Keywords:

Coding, Literacy, Crowdcoding, Visual programming, Europe, FlagShip.