Hands-on Labs for a Mini-Course on Mobile Application Development

Qusay H. Mahmoud, Nicholas Mair, Younis Mohamed, Sunny Dhillon

Email contact: cmer@uoguelph.ca

A poster at the 43th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), Raleigh, NC, USA, March 2012.

Overview

The labs are designed for 2 – 3 hours each for a total of 8 to 12 hours of lab time. Each lab consists of a set of experiments followed by exercises. In the experiments, a practical scenario is presented and a complete application is developed based on that scenario. Students are provided with startup-code to experiment with, and in the exercise section, they are asked to add more features to the application. In the first lab students learn about the development tools and experiment with developing user interfaces using HTML 5 for mobile devices. In the second lab, students learn how to handle events using JavaScript for the user interfaces developed in lab 1. In lab 3, the students learn about device-network communication (AJAX), jQuery, and how to pull data from an Internet resource, and finally in lab 4 the students learn how to put the whole application together, test it in a simulator, and then load it and test it on a physical device (e.g. BlackBerry Smartphone or PlayBook). All four labs focus on a single theme (building a Google Scholar App).

BlackBerry Smartphone Edition

BlackBerry PlayBook Edition