Create@School

What it was

Create@School was the school edition of Pocket Code, developed during the No One Left Behind project. Where Pocket Code hands a child an open canvas, Create@School wrapped that canvas in the things a teacher needs: game templates tied to a subject, tasks a class can complete inside a lesson slot, and a web tool for setting the work and marking it.

The point was not to teach programming as a subject of its own. It was to let pupils build a small game about whatever the lesson was about (a physics concept, a historical event, a set of vocabulary), and to learn the coding incidentally along the way.

What it added to Pocket Code

The published evaluation lists four things:

• Customisation for education environments. The same block-based authoring, arranged for a class rather than for a hobbyist.
• Pre-coded game templates. Adventure, action, quiz and puzzle games with the mechanics already written, so a pupil personalises backgrounds, landscapes, characters, extra levels and difficulty instead of starting from an empty screen.
• 48 new features and improvements identified during the project, drawn from what happened in the pilot classrooms rather than from a specification written in advance.
• The GPII accessibility framework. Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure settings applied automatically per pupil: larger text, appropriate colours and contrast, vibration, for pupils with special educational needs and sensory impairments.

The Project Management Dashboard

The dashboard is the half of the system that usually goes unmentioned, and it is the half teachers rated highest. It is a web interface built on the idea of running a game jam in class: the teacher holds class lists, assigns game projects, reviews what pupils produce and evaluates it against curricular objectives. Pupils upload their project to it at the end of the lesson, a small design decision that, in our reading, does a good deal of work in a 45-minute period: the handover is one action rather than a scramble to save work on 25 devices.

Behind it sits an analytics module that turns classroom activity into quantitative values for socio-behavioural constructs: confidence, self-efficacy, performance, interest, creativity, persistence, effort and time spent, and concentration. Marking is therefore about the subject and the process, not about whether the code was elegant. In our view that is the only way the approach works at all for a teacher of biology or language who does not program.

How it was rated

• Teachers on the dashboard A desired product, the paper's strongest result
• Pupils on the app Neutral on average, from 115 respondents
• Templates Saved more than 40% of coding time
• Named weakness No link to the school management system
• Evidence base Spanish pilot only; acceptance, not learning outcomes

Those figures come from the evaluation of the Spanish pilot, two schools in Andalusia across two academic years, and they measure acceptance and user experience rather than attainment. Nothing in the study shows that pupils learned more of any subject. Teachers rated the dashboard a desired product that satisfied their expectations, and what they valued was tangible, quantified feedback on things such as persistence, concentration and sharing that they were not otherwise tracking. Pupils rated Create@School neutral, which the authors read as satisfying expectations without yet being the pupils' desired product, and they note that the app was still accepted.

The dashboard's one named weakness is the practical one to remember: it was not integrated with the school management system, so project grades could not be transferred there automatically, and the paper says directly that this diminished the application's attractiveness. That is a procurement question rather than a pedagogical one, and it is the sort of thing that decides whether a tool survives its second term.

We have gone through both verdicts, and the gap between them, onhow it was rated. The 40% figure is the most portable finding of the lot, because it holds whichever app you use, and the argument for starting pupils on an almost finished game is set out inwhy half-finished games work better.

Current status

The project's funded phase ended on 30 June 2017 and Create@School is no longer operated from this domain. The underlying Pocket Code and Catrobat work continues independently at TU Graz. If you arrived here from a citation, the project record, thepilot sites and the published evaluation below are what you are most likely looking for.