  There is a burgeoning trend of smartphone ownership in Africa due to the low
costs of Android smartphones and the global increase in social media usage.
Building upon previous works that introduced a smartphone-based coding course
to secondary and tertiary students in Ghana via an in-person program and an
online course, this work introduced Africans in 37 countries to our online
smartphone-based course in 2019. Students in this 8-week course read lesson
notes, submitted assignments, collaborated with peers, and facilitators in an
online forum and completed open and closed-ended surveys after the course. We
performed qualitative and quantitative analyses on the data from the course.
  Out of the 709 students that applied, 210 were officially admitted to the
course after passing the preliminary assignments. And at the end of the course,
72% of the 210 students completed the course. Additionally, students'
assignment submissions and self-reports showed an understanding of the
programming concepts, with comparable performance between males and females and
across educational levels. Also, students mentioned that the lesson notes were
easy to understand and they enjoyed the experience of writing code on their
smartphones. Moreover, students adequately received help from peers and
facilitators in the course forum. Lastly, results of a survey sent to students
a year after completing this program showed that they had developed various
applications, wrote online tutorials, and learned several tools and
technologies. We were successful at introducing coding skills to Africans using
smartphones through SuaCode Africa.
