Abstract:

Our schedule for undergraduate bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (most certainly part of the STEM) includes a few skill-based elective courses, such as mobile application development or web application development course. Most often, these courses are offered to students on their second (out of three) year of their education process. This paper shall shortly describe our introductory mobile application development course which is expected to give the students enough knowledge and lab-based skills to be able to develop native Android applications with basic functionalities. The development environment and main topics lectured in our 3 ECTS (30 hours of lectures and 15 hours of computer labs as part of the regular education process) will be given, as well as the expected learning outcomes. Since the course is skill-related, it is expected that each student finishes, documents, and presents all computer lab tasks to the teacher as minimum proof of achieving the basic outcomes. Additionally, each student can choose a topic related to mobile app development and explore it on their own, resulting in an additional application (or Android activities add to the app from computer labs) which is to be documented and presented. Sometimes, better students with a higher interest in mobile applications extend their small projects and use it as a part or even the foundation of their final graduate work.

This paper also discusses some real-world issues related to the native Android application development environment and its usage in computer labs. A few topics (user interface and layout design, basic event handling, and simple usage of certain system services) are covered in more detail, with additional remarks about some topics that may be important but are often not being lectured (due to time limits). Some of the topics often selected by students for their small projects (for now, most often location services related) are depicted with student application examples. Since the course was only held regularly (face-to-face, in-person) until recently and not yet held during the Covid-19 outbreak in remote e-learning mode, some thoughts about adapting it (if needed in the future) to remote e-learning are also included.

Keywords:

Mobile application, native mobile app, Android, development, course, environment.