Online programming school Codecademy has some good news this morning: it’s released an iPhone app which will teach you how to write code on your handset. It’s called Hour of Code, and like the main Codecademy website itself is completely free to use.

Codecademy was founded just over two years ago, and was one of the first really successful examples of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It began with a simple, playful introduction to JavaScript programming that took place within a console window inside your web browser. Since then Codecademy has added tutorials on Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP and jQuery to its lesson plans, as well as web design fundamentals and more.

What’s missing from this and other online courses – like MIT’s popular Scratch, for example – are mobile versions. I’ve been frustrated because I have an old Android tablet which has been more or less passed on to my seven-year-old daughter, but have struggled to find decent apps for teaching her the basics of programming. There’s the newly added Lightbot, but precious little else. As tablets are now de facto educational tools, it’s a big oversight I reckon.

Codecademy’s one hour course is proving popular, though, although this initial version is limited to five general principles of logic and code design. According to Codecademy founder Zac Sims more lessons will be added later this week. There’s no news on an Android version, sadly.