Teaching students to learn to learn mobile phone programming

Abstract

This paper describes experiences of the instructor of a course dealing with mobile phone programming. This instance of the course (offered yearly since 2010) reuses the academic content of a traditional software engineering course, but requires mobile phone application development for concrete deliverables that exemplify competency of the academic concepts of the course. The paper describes the tradeoffs between teaching the material vs. students learning the material, group dynamics and constraints, as well as technical recommendations for faculty who are considering offering a course that concentrates on mobile phone applications.