osukaru16 / hackerlite

Python-based programming language, compiler and tutorial app, designed to help children in developing countries learn programming, by supporting remote compilation through SMS

HackerLite

This is a mobile app to help kids from developing countries to learn how to code. It is compatible with iOS, Android, mobile Web browsers and feature phones.

A user can go through 10 basic programming lessons presented as a story and receive one programming puzzle every week. To do this, we created a minimalistic programing language called LILO and considered two constraints:

• Phone's computer power
• Phone's internet connection speed and quality

If a kid is using a smartphone's native application or browser, they will be able to download a very small app that has ten programming lessons and an interactive code editor with on-device compilation to solve one programming puzzle every week. This means they have access to a portable developing environment that only depends on a weekly SMS to get the challenges.

On the other hand, if a kid is using a feature phone, they will have access to one programming puzzle every week, coding using only SMS. The text messages are transmitted to our server where our LILO compiler will produce Python code from LILO's reduced syntax to evaluate the output of the puzzle and send back its result.

Features, challenges and things we think are cool:

• LILO compiler
• Light and engaging interactive programming tutorials
• JavaScript on-device compilation
• SMS coding capabilities

Lilo compiler and tests can be found in /python