Acquisition of programming skills by Thai teenagers without access to traditional PCs or laptops through their smartphones

Arnan Sipitakiat and Wolfgang Slany have both been involved for many years in bringing programming skills to children and teenagers. Programming has become both a fundamental cultural technique as well as the basis of a significant part of today’s industry and economy. At the same time, programming skills have not yet found their way into traditional curricula, neither in Austria nor in Thailand. The reasons are plentiful, ranging from inertia of the educational system to insufficient availability of computers in schools and, in the case of Thailand, also in private homes, especially in rural areas. Since 2010, Wolfgang Slany has developed a mobile application that allows kids to acquire programming skills through their mobile phones. The project has, among many other successes, won the Austrian National Prize for Innovation in Multimedia and e-Business in 2013, the Young Minds Award of the European Commission in 2015, the Internet for Refugees Prize in 2016, and the Re-Imagine Education Gold Award for the best European educational app in 2016 awarded by Wharton School (best MBA world-wide) in the US.

Mobile internet coverage and ownership of smartphones now reaches levels up to 80% even in rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the same trend is true for Asian countries, especially when one looks at teenagers and young adults. The mobile app developed in Austria is being offered in Thai language and has been optimized for teenagers in terms of usability and user experience. In this project, we have studied how to most effectively introduce the app to teenagers in Thailand.