Teaching Computational Thinking to Primary School Children During a Pandemic “Jayden Made an App, So Can You”

Mobile applications represent a potential breakthrough in time of crisis. Especially now with this COVID19 pandemic. Schools at all levels are forced to use and integrate them for educational purposes while the world is in lockdown. Different types of apps are used to perform variety of tasks and activities in this emergency ubiquitous learning environment. In this paper, the authors attempt to describe a method/approach on how to introduce mobile app design and development in primary school online curriculum, and describe several implementation visual programming tools for developing mobile applications. These tools are very easy to use and can help students develop understanding of how to integrate mobile applications into their allocated remote school projects and tasks, hence enhancing their logical and computation thinking, and may encourage them to use mobile technologies and applications into their schoolwork later on when they go back to normal classes. A mobile app that was designed and developed by a 4th grader to complete a school project is being demonstrated as an example.