Teaching Android development using eLearning material in a traditional Java programming course

Abstract

World-wide some 152 million smart phones were sold in the first quarter of 2012 with a 49.9% increase from the year before (IDC, 2012). An important aspect of this popularity is the wide range of specialised programs known as apps that phone owners can readily acquire and install. For instance the number of apps on Google’s play market for the Android platform has almost doubled within a year to just under 500,000 apps (Appbrain.com, 2012) and the amount of apps is often used in advertising as a major selling point for phones (Apple, 2012). It is therefore important for students’ employability to gain skills in app development. Educationalists are starting to teach aspects of app development, for example developing workshops to aid learning the skills necessary to use the Google App Inventor tool (Abelson, Chang, Friedman, Lomas, & Wolber, 2010) (Hsu, Rice, & Dawley, 2012).

In this paper the author reports on their experiences of embedding an online tutorial on mobile Android programming development into the curriculum of a traditional second level undergraduate Java programming course. The distribution of the resulting marks did not follow the traditional distribution of a normal curve, and reflections on this unexpected distribution are provided.