On Saturday the 15th of March 2015, we launched our ‘Introduction to Mobile Android Development’ course, right here at our South Kensington Campus. The course was directed and taught by Imperial alumna and Google Engineer, Aga Madurska. Here she gives an account of the day and what future attendees can expect when it’s next run:
“Design, Code, Test, Repeat! Saturday was a busy day – we ran our first course on Android development and introduced the participants to the basics of coding and building mobile apps. The main aim of the course was to make it clear that anyone, anywhere can create and publish an Android mobile application – it really isn’t that complicated and there are plenty of resources out there to help you. Most of the tools are free!
We started off by trying to figure out how to model a house in code and then we moved on to modelling some more abstract concepts. We worked our way through various XML properties, basic layout concepts and typical building blocks of a user interface.
By lunchtime everyone had a good grasp of how interfaces are created and styled. After a short break, we continued with user interaction – how to detect when a user presses a button on the screen of a device and how to react to this. This was a bit more challenging, but also extremely rewarding. Victory cries echoed through the computer lab as all of us, one by one, managed to make our own creations run on phones and tablets.
We wrapped up by talking about the publishing process, clearing out why we need signing keys, and what signing really means. The day ended well past 5pm with a set of pointers to a variety of helpful knowledge sources, so that everyone could continue their projects at home.
The course was extremely successful and we are now in the process of scheduling more dates throughout the year. Looking forward to seeing you there!”
For future dates and further information on the next ‘Introduction to Making Android Apps’ course, please visit www.imperial.ac.uk/cpd/mobiledevelopment. Alternatively, you can email us at cpd@imperial.ac.uk or call us on 020 7594 6882.