Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1

University of Maryland, College Park via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Free Online Course (Audit)
Languages

English
Certificate

Paid Certificate Available
Duration & workload

28 hours
Sessions

On-Demand
Subtitles

Arabic, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, English, Spanish, Kazakh, Hindi, Swedish, Korean, Greek, Chinese, Thai, Ukrainian, Japanese, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Hungarian, Bengali, Pashto, Urdu, Azerbaijani, Farsi

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This course introduces you to the design and implementation of Android applications for mobile devices. You will develop an app from scratch, assuming a basic knowledge of Java, and learn how to set up Android Studio, work with various Activities and create simple user interfaces to make your apps run smoothly.

Syllabus

Android Platform and Development Environment
Application Fundamentals and the Activity Class
Intents, Permissions, and Fragments
User Interface Classes
Build From Scratch Assignment

Taught by

Adam Porter

Reviews

4.2 rating, based on 41 Class Central reviews

4.6 rating at Coursera based on 683 ratings

Start your review of Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1

Dean

This course suffers from a fundamentally flawed approach to teaching Android development. It tries to teach Android development through lectures instead of having students write Android applications. While the production quality of these lectures…

This course suffers from a fundamentally flawed approach to teaching Android development. It tries to teach Android development through lectures instead of having students write Android applications. While the production quality of these lectures is high, they are nearly useless for learning Android development.

Learning to write Android applications is mostly learning the Android API. It is a rich, complex API and just like learning any other API such as JPA, JSF, or Swing you have to write code to learn it. While this course does have programming assignments, Coursera defeats the learning process by distributing Android applications that are more than 90% complete with a few TO DO blocks in them for students fill in with a few lines of code.

This approach is useless. What is needed is to have students write entire Android applications. In a MOOC applications from thousands of students could only be graded by an autograder, and this I believe is why Coursera chose to over-emphasize lectures instead. Coursera would not spend the money needed to develop an Android autograder.

It looks like the upcoming version of this course has added 2 mini-projects in which students write complete apps. This is a step in the right direction. I'm currently working through the Udacity Android course (half way through) and I recommend that course over this one because the Udacity course makes you write nearly all of your own code.

The Princeton courses on algorithms by professors Sedgewick and Wayne have a very impressive autograder that could serve as a model for Coursera's Android courses. The professors specify an API that the application has to implement and the autograder gives detailed feedback on the implementation. There will be some challenges for an autograder for Android applications. It may not be possible to autograde an app that plays an audio or video file. Someone has to watch and listen to see if it is played correctly. Peer grading would be needed in these cases.

Coursera is responsible for this failed approach. During the second course in this specialization (taught by Professor Douglas Schmidt) some of us were lamenting the lack of an autograder. Professor Schmidt responded that there was no way to develop an autograder since they had no budget for the two courses. This course alone provided over $400,000 in revenue to Coursera, but they didn't invest any of it back into the course. Coursera ate all of the seed corn.

Professor Porter probably did the best he could with what he had to work with. It is up to Coursera to provide the resources (money) to create the technology needed to teach this course effectively. Startups are supposed to create new technology, not repackage centuries-old techniques and deploy them on the web.

Get with it, Coursera.
Will Smith

Dr. Porter is a fine lecturer and the course is well organized. Unfortunately, the course also presents dated material and uses Eclipse--which is no longer supported by Google as an Android IDE. If you're working for a for-profit company more than…

Dr. Porter is a fine lecturer and the course is well organized.

Unfortunately, the course also presents dated material and uses Eclipse--which is no longer supported by Google as an Android IDE. If you're working for a for-profit company more than likely you're going to know AS, IntelliJ, etc. Eclipse has not been the king snake for android development in industry for some time, at least in my experience (of course there are always companies and government organizations that are slow to upgrade their IT environments-but with Google not supporting Eclipse teaching via Eclipse is a disservice to everyone).

I recognize it must be hard to continuously update course content in such a fluid and rapidly changing environment such as Android, but if the instructors wish to truly give the students the best chance at success in the market then the course material must be updated more often.

I work in industry for a company that uses agile software development methods to develop Android and web-based apps (I'm a product owner who has published my own apps in the market and for my company's customers). Based on my experience, this is not the class material that would get you hired where I work, or have worked.

I was disappointed that this class is a time machine using outdated info. It simply wasn't worth my time to download, install, and config Eclipse or port over the tests and examples to AS. I'd much rather prefer to study on my own using YouTube versus this class.
Anonymous

I enjoyed the class and learned a lot. The video lectures were clear and provided a very good overview of the topics.
I found the labs were very difficult. The lectures gave you an overview but the labs were in the details. The lectures did not give you enough so you had to go hunting in the online documentation. While that is fine in general, many times I was directed to very high level documentation. I often felt I was left to try random code snippets without a clear understanding of what or why. Overall I think the gap between the lectures and coding was too large and left too much unclear.
Aqeel Labash

I've attended many other courses and training courses ( non-academic) trying to learn android development, technical tutorials wasn't suffeicient to get me up and running , I've attended (Creative , Playful Android ) which took about 8 weeks which I believe really prepare me for this course. but this course put me on the right track , right now am able to build an application from the ground even things I didn't take in the lecture.
am very thankful for Dr.Adam and every one how helped in this course.
Thanks , and keep moving forward.
Anonymous

The course is perfectly organized, very precise, well spoken, covers everything for a new android developer to start a new career in mobile development. It takes from grounds up. I am still in middle of course, but can't wait to rate this class. I have been on youtube researching tones of good android course to make my definite move. At last I found very well explained course on net and good part is eventually it to get recognized certificate too.
Anonymous

Boring and outdated lectures. Def not the right way to learn Android app development. I'd recommend serious learners to directly start by following the training material on the official Android documentation site: developer.android.com/training . If you prefer video lectures then the Udacity courses listed in their Nanodegree curriculum are the best. They are co-produced by Google engineers.
Panos Gr

The course is quite challenging for a beginner but will leave you with a taste of the immense world of Android Programming. I really liked how the structure of this class is provided. Everything is well organized and well explained. The weekly projects (for which you have two weeks btw) are not very hard to accomplish but you will need some research on some subjects if you are not familiar with Android concepts.
Maziar Mehrabi

I used to struggle a lot in learning Android before I took these courses. Prof. A. Porter explains everything clearly and the studying facilities provided by Coursera platform such as discussion forums and peer assessments makes the learning process much easier. Moreover, the course material gets updated in respect to Android Studio, Eclipse and the latest APIs when necessary.
Jorge Agudo Praena

This course makes learning to program Android apps easy and funny. I would definitely recommend to anyone who has absolutely no background on mobile development (as me) and wants to start quickly but on solid knowledge. It’s a super course and Pr Porter excels at explaining all the concepts.
Anonymous

The technology used was outdated. No android studio and it was hard to follow because of this. I think the professor knows what he's talking about, but needs to update his videos to make thing up-to-date.
Jerome Vonk

I learned a lot. Of course it is expected that you’ll have to figure out some things at your own. Nevertheless, it is good stuff.
Marjorie Moreno Ivy

Thanks Mr. Porter. It is the best course ever. The explanations were crystal clear and I have learned a lot here.
Aziz Houari

Salut, c la première fois que je utilise les cours a distance, et j'espère d'apprendre le maximum, ce site classe centrale j ai le trouvé de la part un ami très proche à moi
Sagar

This program is very useful for me. I have learned lots of new ideas and really, I got more functions and much other helpful information from this course.
Dmitri

This Course is suitable for people who already know Java SE. That is an important thing. Once you know it, all the Course would be a pleasure to participate in. The video lectures are perfect. The exercises are not very difficult. I would suggest to study all examples. There is a real code that you can use in your projects.

P.S. I've done all homeworks in Android Studio. There is no problems to use it!
But I suggest to the course stuff either implement their lectures using Android Studio or make a topic with all directions step-by-step about migrating from Eclipse to Android Studio.
Erick

I had programmed before with Android. But in this class I learned that I did not know the fundamentals about Android. This first part of the course has complimented my knowledge about Android. I will continue studying the remains of the courses, of course.
Anonymous

Excellent course!! These courses gave me a great revision, corrected some of my concepts, and taught me a lot more new materials. I recommend this course to those who want to challenge themselves. Thanks Prof Porter and team.
Cláudio Tereso

I had a hard time following the course, it takes a lot of time.
In the end it looks that I didn't learn a lot :(
Let's go to the second part and hope that more ground is achieved.
César García Pécora

The course was really helpful, it introduced me to the Android world like no other course did in the past. I will do the whole Specialization as the other courses seem to be great too.
Andrei Razvan Maresu