History & Documents

TouchDev's work started in the Spring of 2023. However, a big progress was made by a summer research through Caldwell University's STEM Advance Summer Research Program.

The purpose of the study at that time aimed to develop and evaluate TouchDev, providing at least two benefits over the existing IDEs and programming languages. First, the focus of TouchDev interactions was on touch (tap) rather than typing or drag-and-drop or block-building. Reimagining coding through touch-based interactions was aimed at expanding accessibility to anyone who may own a touchscreen device (without abandoning those on laptops and desktops who may use clicks instead of touches), as well as addressing usability issues and frustrations with drag-and-drop accuracy. Second, the focus of TouchDev was on full application development and deployment. TouchDev is meant to be a tool capable of building real applications, rather than just toy educational projects (as is the case for IDEs like Scratch).

TouchDev (as of Summer 2024) is still under research and development. The fulfillment of its study brings a position where TouchDev, a heuristically evaluated and developed touch-based IDE ready and approved by IRB (which it already is on April '24 ✅) to be tested by participants. The participants will include novice computer science students or individuals who have limited experience with coding and application development. The independent variable in the proposed future study will be the development method (TouchDev vs Scratch vs traditional text-based programming). The dependent variables will include both subjective and objective measures, including performance (i.e., project success and coding efficiency), experience, perception and the themes and patterns in the responses.

These documents provide insight into the evolution of TouchDev and its various improvements over time.

Private Google Drive Folder (request access, if necessary)

Outdated Code Repository (for historical commits)

New Code Repository (under TouchDev Organization)

Domain: touchdev.app

Documentation (this page): docs.touchdev.app