Rock bottom, the world, the sky: Catrobat, an extremely large-scale and long-term visual coding project relying purely on smartphones

TL;DR

Catrobat is a large-scale, long-term visual coding project enabling smartphone-based app creation and sharing, with extensive accessibility, multilingual support, and integrations for educational robots and external devices, reaching over 700,000 users worldwide.

Contribution

This paper introduces Catrobat, a comprehensive open-source visual programming platform for smartphones that supports diverse extensions, accessibility, and global community engagement, unlike prior PC-dependent systems.

Findings

Over 700,000 users from 180 countries

More than 50 languages supported

Extensive extensions for robots and external devices

Abstract

Most of the 700 million teenagers everywhere in the world already have their own smartphones, but comparatively few of them have access to PCs, laptops, OLPCs, Chromebooks, or tablets. The free open source non-profit project Catrobat allows users to create and publish their own apps using only their smartphones. Initiated in 2010, with first public versions of our free apps since 2014 and 47 releases of the main coding app as of July 2018, Catrobat currently has more than 700,000 users from 180 countries, is available in 50+ languages, and has been developed so far by almost 1,000 volunteers from around the world ("the world"). Catrobat is strongly inspired by Scratch and indeed allows to import most Scratch projects, thus giving access to more than 30 million projects on our users' phones as of July 2018. Our apps are very intuitive ("rock bottom"), have many accessibility settings, e.g., for kids with visual or cognitive impairments, and there are tons of constructionist tutorials and courses in many languages. We also have created a plethora of extensions, e.g., for various educational robots, including Lego Mindstorms and flying Parrot quadcopters ("the sky"), as well as for controlling arbitrary external devices through Arduino or Raspberry Pi boards, going up to the stratosphere and even beyond to interplanetary space ("the sky"). A TurtleStitch extension allowing to code one's own embroidery patterns for clothes is currently being developed. Catrobat among others intensely focuses on including female teenagers. While a dedicated version for schools is being developed, our apps are meant to be primarily used outside of class rooms, anywhere and in particular outdoors ("rock bottom", "the world"). Catrobat is discovered by our users through various app stores such as Google Play and via social media channels such as YouTube as well as via our presence on Code.org.