Learning to Program on KaiOS: a Hands-on Coding School for Developing Climate Service Apps

The demand for short and intense courses intended to teach new or improve existing pragmatic ICT skills, required for solving a given problem in a real context, has been raised especially by the industry. We provide an example where a pragmatic coding school model has been shown to be an effective way to teach new skills and enhance prior knowledge in a short timeframe, among undergraduate computer science students of the University of Namibia (UNAM). This paper presents a coding school for climate service app development, organized jointly by the University of Turku (UTU), Finland, and UNAM, at the UTU satellite campus within the UNAM main campus. We describe the coding school's design and implementation phases, as well as analyze lessons learned, based on which we suggest actions to improve similar schools in the future. Furthermore, we demonstrate a method by which the coding school is linked to the requirements of an international research project demanding local input in its co-design.