Android App Development Using Visual Programming

31st October and 1st November 2014

Who should participate:

• lecturers, teachers and trainers
• programmers, software engineers, IT staff
• educational technologists
• entrepreneurs and business owners
• anyone interested in learning mobile app development.

The objectives of the workshop are to assist you to:

• Familiarize yourself with the AI2 platform
• Use the Designer and Blocks Editor
• Implement various components in applications
• Design rich user experiences (UX)
• Practise packaging and distribution of applications.

The Android operating system is currently dominating the smart phone and tablet market. The Free and Open Source (FOSS) frameworks and ease of use has made Android a much after OS for use by manufacturers. With thousands of apps available through the Google Play store, Android provides a feature rich experience to the user and has an app for just about anything imaginable.

The exponential growth of the smartphone and tablet markets over the past few years has caught the attention of many sectors including governments, industries and educators. As a result, Mobile Business (mBusiness), Mobile Learning (mLearning) and Mobile Government (mGovernment) have become some of the fastest growing sectors taking information and services to a global market through mobile devices. This has given rise to a massive demand for various customized apps resulting in businesses and services investing heavily in custom mobile applications.

Traditionally, Android app development is a highly specialised field reserved only for software engineers and programmers. However, the massive demand for customized apps has lead to the democratization of Android app development through the concept of ‘Visual programming’. Visual Programming is a concept which allows non-programmers to build powerful application using logical building blocks. It can best be explained as constructing a jigsaw puzzle using fitting virtual puzzle pieces. Each of these puzzle pieces are blocks of code which form complete programs when assembled logically. The leading visual app development platform, at present, is the App Inventor (AI2) platform developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the US. It has joined forces with Google to provide a robust solution for customized app development for the Android OS.

This workshop aims at introducing the basic and some intermediate concepts of Android app development on the AI2 platform. By the end of the workshop you will be able to use the Designer and Blocks Editor components of App Inventor to create apps which can be readily downloaded and used on your Android smartphone or tablet. The hands-on sessions will guide you on how to use features such as text-to-speech, the accelerometer, speech recognition, drawing, video, games and music playback. You will also create three applications which will give you a solid foundation to develop more complex apps in the future. Finally you will learn how to package and distribute your app.

Workshop schedule: Click here

Facilitator: Ishan Abeywardena