Syllabus
Welcome to Intro to Android Development!
Hello and welcome to the class! We are your instructors for this course, Mihili and Zach, and we’re incredibly excited to help you learn how to make Android apps this semester. It wasn't too long ago that we were learning the intricacies of Android ourselves, and now we wish to pass on the knowledge we've learned to you. It’s going to be a great semester and we can’t wait to get started!
Course Staff
Zach Seidner
Course Instructor
Mihili Herath
Course Instructor
Jonathan Chen
TA
Gregor Guerrier
TA
Justin Guo
TA
Veronica Starchenko
TA
Olivia Jiang
TA
Helen Bian
TA
Kelsey Liu
TA
Amy Wang
TA
Andrew Cheung
TA
If you have a question for the course staff, ask a private question on Ed Discussion or schedule a meeting during office hours.
Course Schedule
This schedule is tentative and subject to changes to Cornell's Fall 2024 academic calendar.
Lectures will be held in Olin 155 at 8:35-9:25pm every Monday and Wednesday.
All lectures will be recorded and posted to AppDev's YouTube channel after the lecture.
Towards the end of the course, you'll be participating in the 2-week Hack Challenge alongside students from other AppDev courses, to create a full-fledged mobile application.
Outlined below is a schedule of our lectures, discussions, and projects (with their due dates).
10/14
Intro to Kotlin & Android Studio
P1 (Ungraded)
10/20
10/16
Intro to Kotlin Part 2 (The Beauty of Kotlin)
10/20
Modifiers, lazy lists, and reactive UI
P2
10/27
10/22
Demo: Modifiers, lazy lists, and reactive UI
10/27
Animations, intents, Android Manifest
P3
11/4
10/29
Demo: Animations, intents, Android Manifest
11/4
Navigation and coroutines
P4
11/11
11/6
Demo: navigation and coroutines
11/11
Networking and data storage
P5
11/18
11/13
Demo: Networking and data storage
11/18
Flows and MVVM
P6
11/25
11/20
Demo: Flows and MVVM
11/25
Bonus lecture: TBD
Thanksgiving break
12/2
Final bonus lecture 🥲 TBD
Grading
Note: for Fall 24, you can take this course for up to 2 credits, in the event of credit overload. However, regardless of the number of credits you're signed up for, you are still expected to complete 2 credits worth of work.
This is a 2 credit S/U course and grading will be determined by all projects, with more emphasis on the Hack Challenge final project.
Each project is worth 10-12 points, and the final project is worth 20 points: 10 points for the midpoint submission and 10 points for the final submission. Each project (with the exception of the first) will have extra credit opportunities for you to challenge yourself and dive deeper into Android development.
To pass this course, you will need >= 70 points by the end of the semester.
Assignments
Weight
P2
13
P3
13
P4
13
P5
13
P6
13
Hack Challenge
20
Participation
15
Total
100
Passing Score
70
Attendance
Attendance is required for all students of the course for the lectures, and are permitted at most 3 absences (not including bonus lectures which do not require attendance). If you exceed this amount you will be given a 0 for participation. Attendance will be taken through Kahoot during each lecture, and if you show up late come to one of us at the end of class and let us know your net ID.
Late policy
You are given 6 slip days that you can use on any of the assignments aside from the Hack Challenge project. Each assignment will be opened for late submissions for an extra 2 days after the regular deadline. If you submit an assignment late and run out of slip days, assignments will be automatically docked 2 points.
Note on grading for assignments:
If you are unable to finish the project as a result of an error, please add a note in a README.txt file explaining:
the error that you are encountering
the suspected cause of the error (doesn't have to be correct!)
the solutions you have attempted to resolve the error
This helps out the grader quickly find and debug errors and give partial points for effort!
It is also helpful to leave broken code in your project (but have it commented out). This will allow us to better understand your thought process and give you partial points for missing features.
Course Help
If you ever need help, you can always post on the course Ed Discussion. We will be monitoring the class feed to be helping you! For more complicated questions, try to attend office hours if at all possible.
Office hours are held at multiple times throughout the week by instructors and TAs. See the course Google Calendar for details
We are here to help you succeed! Our number one goal is for you to LEARN Android development and we will be with you each step of the way to make sure that happens 👏.
Hack Challenge
At the end of the course, you and up to three other members of AppDev courses (Intro to Digital Product Design, Intro to Backend Engineering, Intro to iOS) will have the chance to work in a group and apply all that you’ve learned in the course to create a functional, polished app.
Participation in the Hack Challenge is required as the final project for this course. The course staff will judge the best apps and there will be sponsored prizes! Last semester’s winners won Google Homes, bluetooth speakers, Echo Dots, or Chromecasts. This could be you this semester, so start brainstorming ideas!
Academic Integrity & Collaboration
As with any other course at Cornell, the code of academic integrity will be enforced in this class. All individual projects must be done by yourself. All University-standard Academic Integrity guidelines should be followed. This includes proper attribution of any resources found online, including anything that may be open-sourced by AppDev. The University guidelines for Academic Integrity can be found here.
We encourage using the internet to learn more about Android development, but again, any code you submit must be written by you!
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