Pocket Code

What it is

Pocket Code is the app of the Catrobat project, developed at Technische Universität Graz. Instead of typing code, a child snaps together labelled blocks in the style of Lego bricks, an approach inspired by MIT's Scratch, and the result runs on the same phone or tablet it was written on. Pre-coded bricks reach the device's own sensors and can drive LEGO MINDSTORMS hardware. It is free and open source.

That the program runs on the device itself mattered for schools: the trials did not depend on a licence, a lab of desktop machines or a purchasing decision. The Spanish pilot ran on 338 tablets and phones, seven-inch and 10-inch Android models of the mid-2010s, which is modest hardware by design rather than by accident.

Its role in the project

No One Left Behind shaped a school-facing edition from Pocket Code,Create@School, and the two were used in sequence rather than side by side. In the Spanish pilot the first academic year used Pocket Code in class, in a version that came before the school edition existed, to train pupils and teachers in coding and to produce an initial set of templates and technical modules. The second year is when Create@School and the teachers' dashboard were completed and validated in lessons. The other two pilot sites, in Austria and the United Kingdom, had their own evaluation studies, which we have not been able to locate, so everything below is Spain.

How the pilot's teachers compared the two

This is the more interesting part of the record, because it is rare to have teachers' ratings of a general-purpose tool and of the school edition built out of it from the same classrooms. Both apps came out positively accepted, both with a reasonable balance between practical and hedonic qualities, and Create@School scored higher overall. But the two did not win in the same places.

• Pragmatic quality Create@School's mean a full point higher
• Pocket Code stronger on Professional look, innovativeness, novelty
• Create@School stronger on Simplicity, manageability, clear structure
• Raters The Spanish pilot's 16 educators; four worked with both apps
• Measured Acceptance and user experience, not learning outcomes

Pragmatic quality is the survey's term for practicality and functionality, and it is where the gap is widest: Pocket Code's mean sits a full point below Create@School's, and below every other attribute mean Pocket Code itself scored. The reason the authors give is the templates. Pre-coded game mechanics saved more than 40% of coding time and made it easier for pupils to bring in images and sensors, which is exactly the kind of advantage that shows up as simplicity and clear structure on a teacher's questionnaire.

Pocket Code held the opposite ground. It rated better for professional look, innovativeness and novelty, and it was slightly ahead on stimulation, the dimension about being offered something new to get better at. The authors' explanation is disarmingly simple: Pocket Code came first, so the impact of first use was stronger. Neither product reached the maximum rating on any quality, and at that stage neither was yet the desired product for the people using it, which the paper states about its own tools.

Two cautions on reading that comparison. It comes from the Spanish pilot's evaluation, so it is 16 educators in two Andalusian schools between 2015 and 2017, not a verdict from the project as a whole. And the instrument measures acceptance and user experience, whether people found the tools practical, stimulating and attractive, not whether anyone learned more. The four dimensions and what each side responded to are set out onhow it was rated.

Where it lives now

Pocket Code and Catrobat are independent of this project and continued after its funded period ended in 2017. Development is community-run out of TU Graz. Nothing on this domain distributes or maintains the app. This page exists because published work cites this URL.