Friday, January 27, 2012

Anyone interested in an Android class?

Whenever other techies know I'm an Android developer, they always exclaim, "I want to learn that too!". So I'm toying with the idea of teaching Android to others.

I want to teach a class where we learn the different Android components by building an app. Currently I'm thinking of a parking companion app. The syllabus will look like this:

  • Session 1: Android basics: Activity life cycle, layout by xml etc. You will not be working on the parking app yet.
  • Session 2: Write down the location of your car. You type "Level 2, Area C" in a text box, and click the save button. You'll learn how to get the text out of the text box, save it, and retrive it when you open the app again.
  • Session 3: Add a picture. Use the camera to take a photo of your car, and store it alongside the note.
  • Session 4: Add GPS location. Get the latitude and longitude to link it to Google Maps.
  • Session 5: Map View. Embed a map in your app to show the location of your car.
  • Session 6: Wrap up. Summary of what we did, how everything relates to each other, pointers for further studies.

Since most people have a busy schedule, I'm thinking of making each session 3 hours long. The first two hours is lecture, and the last hour is lab, where you work on your laptop to code up what we just learned. That way you don't have to find time outside of class to do the implementation as homework.

I want to make sure everyone has the SDK installed at the first class, but I know it is hard to enforce that, so I'm thinking of running InstallFests before hand. People come with their laptops, we install Eclipse and the Android SDK together, and make sure everyone has Hello World running by the end. The InstallFests are useful for people who don't have the time for a structured class as well. I'm hoping that once you have your dev environment set up, you will be more likely to go through some tutorials and get started.

Would you take an Android class like this? How about the InstallFests? Please fill in this form if you're interested: http://bit.ly/wh1JMO.

Update 2012/03/09

I'll be teaching the Android class at Blazing Cloud starting April 18. More info here: Android For Programmer.

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