Contextual Android education

Abstract

Advances in mobile phone hardware and development platforms have drastically increased the demand, interest, and potential of mobile applications. We report on development of a new special topics software engineering course that combines the appeal of Android application development with software engineering topics and entrepreneurial thinking. The primary contribution of this project and the focus of this paper is a series of detailed educational laboratory exercises that are designed to supplement the Android documentation by providing contextual examples, activities, and tutorials. The labs were contributed to the Google Code University under the Creative Commons license, resulting in over 30,000 visits and nearly 100,000 pageviews in its first three months.