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).

Class Dates	Topic	Project Assigned	Project Due Date
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:

1. the error that you are encountering

2. the suspected cause of the error (doesn't have to be correct!)

3. 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!