Author Topic: Programming for Android  (Read 5179 times)

Dragon

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Programming for Android
« on: February 02, 2014, 01:46:01 »
In the past, I've developed little web pages and applications for use on mobile devices, but those were pretty much just standard web pages that were made to fit on smaller screens. I've finally begun studying programming native Android applications. At the end of January I registered for an online college course offered by University of Maryland. It's a MOOC (massive open online course) that they are offering for free. Read more about it at http://collegeleaf.com/university-of-maryland-offering-free-online-android-programming-course/.

I just finished my assignments for the 2nd week of the class. There was a lot of reading that was only "suggested" in our assignments but seemed like it was actually required to complete everything, but I'm happy to say that I got it all done and I'm ready for the new week. It was a little frustrating trying to figure out what was going on, especially since I haven't programmed anything in Java for quite a while.

By the way, the instructor said that there are about 170K students in the class now. Talk about a massive class. So far, most of the assignments have been graded by uploading a text file that contained very specific messages that were either written with a copy and pasted message or exported from our application logs, so grading has been automated too. This second week we used a Unit Testing application to get the results that we turned in. "Peer Assessment" has been mentioned which might be used at some point to handle some of the grading, but  that hasn't been necessary yet.
"Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? ... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on. Err, the button turns it on. Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes." - Roy (The IT Crowd)