TouchDevelop is a development environment for mobile and Web apps that runs on phones, tablets, PCs, and even giant touchscreens. Create fun games and useful tools regardless of your working environment.

Nikolai Tillman from Microsoft Research chairs this session at Faculty Summit 2012.

In 2012, we are in the middle of a technology shift: instead of using PCs and laptops, mobile devices are becoming more prevalent for most everyday computing tasks. In fact, never before in human history were incredibly powerful and versatile computing devices such as smartphones available and adopted so broadly.

In this session, we discuss whether and how end-users can program mobile computing devices for fun and to automate tasks and implications for teaching computer science in today’s classrooms. Microsoft Research created the novel application creation environment TouchDevelop, which enables end users to author programs on smartphones—without a PC. We compare the traditional approach of using established programming languages to write mobile applications on a PC to novel programming approaches that enable creating applications on mobile devices directly. By mining existing mobile programming environments, we can infer what kind of applications end users want to create and what challenges they face.

What do you do when your students are more interested in their phone than in what you’re trying to teach them? If you’re Michael Braun, well, you make their phones a central part of their classroom learning. Braun, a computer science teacher at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle teaches “Exploration of Computer Science on Smartphones,” which essentially teaches students how to create mobile apps. In collaboration with Rainier Beach High School, Southshore Middle School, Seattle Public Schools, and Microsoft employees Peli de Halleux (Senior Software Development Engineer) and Chris Mitchell (Principal Development Engineer) assisting through the Microsoft TEALS program). They taught students to use TouchDevelop to create mobile apps. Students were able to install, run, edit, and publish scripts using Windows phones.

The world is experiencing a technology shift. In 2012, touchscreen-based mobile devices, namely smartphones and tablets, will outsell desktops, laptops, and netbooks combined. Powerful, easy-to-use smartphones are likely to be the first and, especially in developing countries, possibly the only computing devices that virtually everyone will own and carry at all times. Is it possible to develop new software directly on these mobile devices, without using a PC? What would a user interface for such a new development model look like?

In this presentation, we present a new tool from Microsoft Research, TouchDevelop, that tries to address these questions. TouchDevelop is an application-creation environment that runs on the smartphone itself-no separate PC required. Its programming language and code editor have been built from scratch around the idea that all code is entered via a touchscreen, without a keyboard. We report on how TouchDevelop is being used today by thousands of people.

On May 4–5, 2012, Microsoft Research Connections held a 24-hour “TouchDevelop@UW Hackathon” at the University of Washington, inviting students to try their hand at TouchDevelop programming. TouchDevelop is a novel application development environment from Microsoft Research that enables users to code right on their smartphones, with no need for a separate PC.