Journey of Android Study Jams Facilitator

By Dhruv Mehta

Hello readers! My name is Dhruv and I am the Android Lead at my college’s Google Developer Student Club (GDSC VIT Bhopal). So, because of that I got the opportunity, to get nominated, for being the Android Study Jams Facilitator for my campus. Therefore I am writing this article to share with all of you my key takeaways and learning which I garnered during this amazing journey of conducting different sessions, events and workshops for Android Study Jams.

What exactly is ‘Android Study Jam’?

Android Study Jams are the series of study groups, workshops or sessions organized and facilitated by a GDSC at a campus for their students to kick start their journey in learning Modern Android Application Development using Kotlin as the programming language. During the course of Android Study Jams, students and members of the GDSC community get an opportunity to learn on how to create beautiful and functional Android Apps. These valuable skills also enabled the campus students to build even more compelling projects for the Solution Challenge 2022.

The learning content was curated and provided by the team of google developers themselves. So this year the Track for Android Study Jams was Android Basics in Kotlin course. This course ‘Android Basics in Kotlin’ is a series of sessions, units, pathways and quizzes focused specifically on learning how to build Android apps without prior Android Experience.
The course also provides virtual badges on your Google Developers profile(https://google.dev/u/new) on completion of each unit and pathway of the course. One could collect upto 16 badges(my profile link) and then share & showcase their achievements on social media.

The Timeline for conducting and hosting Android Study Jams for this iteration was from November 29, 2021 to January 10, 2022.

My role and responsibility :

• Being a facilitator I need to host the study jams campaign at my campus during the above mentioned timeline i.e. from Nov 29th 2021 to Jan 10th, 2022.
• My next responsibility was to create a separate study group of interested students who are willing and eager to learn android app development.
• Further as a facilitator I had to organize a minimum of 3 training sessions to help students get started with Android using Kotlin.
• Moreover I had to myself complete all the tracks of the above mentioned ‘Android Basics in Kotlin’ course during the fixed timeline provided to us, and then submit a proof of validation at the end of the campaign.
• Lastly I had to develop and submit an app in a group setting that solves a real world problem. (More on this later)

My Journey :

Let me divide my journey into a few stages which would make this journey more simple and easy to understand.

• Planning — First and foremost we planned out and discussed all the little details and the nitty gritties for the Android Study Jams. So me along with my few other Core team members of the GDSC discussed on a few pointers and topics that I am listing below :
• Platform decided — Youtube. We decided on the platform for conducting each session or event through the online mode, which would be then live streamed on the Youtube channel of our GDSC VIT Bhopal.
• Social media and marketing strategy — We planned out the social media posts(link), reels and the marketing strategy that we need to follow in order to create the right amount of hype and build up for the Android Study Jams. We had to make sure that the news of the conduction of Android Study Jams reached each and every student of our college.
• Event date and time decide and schedule it on the official gdsc community platform. Next Step was to decide the date and time of the event. This step becomes very important because as the event is online we have to make sure that we get a decent amount of audience on our stream. Hence we need to choose a suitable date and time when the majority of our target audience is free and ready to learn. Further, we had to create the events on the official gdsc community platform, so that all the enrolled members can directly rsvp for the event.
• Floated an initial form for registering the interested students. Lastly to start off for the event we floated an initial registration form for the interested students to register. They had to submit their details and like their name, email id, registration number and most importantly their google developer profile links so that we could track their progress.

The events and sessions conducted -

• In hindsight we conducted three major events or workshop walkthrough sessions which covered the topics of the tracks and pathways mentioned in the Android Basics in Kotlin course.
  - Session 1 : This was the beginner’s session. In this session we targeted to cover the following topics: giving an Introduction to the Android Study Jams program to the audience, explaining the basic Fundamentals of Kotlin programming language, lastly ending it up by Building your first Android App.
• Session 2 : This session was all about the Aesthetics of the application where we went into the details of UI/UX while designing an android application. We covered everything from Layouts to Navigation, to Material Design Guidelines and Best practices for UI development.
• Session 3 : This was the final and the last session so we wanted to do something special for this one, therefore we took the level of this session a notch up and taught the viewers so really important and useful android topics like — navigation component, viewmodel, livedata, coroutines, Collecting Data from the internet, Room database etc. We ended this session by developing an Alphabets App as well which showed a list of alphabets in a listview following the best android practices.

The app submission -

• As mentioned earlier, at the end of the Android Study Jams program, as a facilitator it was my duty and responsibility to submit an entry level android application that I had to develop along with my team of android developers during the course of this Android Study Jams program/campaign. There were a few important instructions and guidelines which the submitted app had to follow to mark itself as a valid submission.
• Hence we ended up creating the ‘AccountMe (app link)’ android application which is An app for college students to manage their transactions. The AccountMe app was created by the team by keeping in mind the aid that it can provide to the college and university students by helping them to individually track and financially manage their accounts.
  (to know more about the application and its working head over to this GitHub repo( repo link) ).

Helping students -

• Created a discord channel for ASJ specially on our GDSC VIT Bhopal official discord server, where the participants could solve their doubts by asking their queries directly to me, the Facilitator of the program. And I was more than willing and happy to help my peers along this wonderful journey.
• Next I had to ensure that the students complete the Android Basics in Kotlin Course. So I, along with my team, tracked each student through their google developer profile and verified whether they have earned the 16 badges or not.
• Lastly, we distributed the Android Study Jams campaign completion certificates to those participants who completed the course and had 16 badges on their google developer profile.

My key takeaways & learnings :

• My first key learning from this entire Android Study Jams Program would be the tremendous amount of sheer Knowledge that I have gained myself while learning through the course and preparing for all these sessions. I learnt a lot of topics to name a few : MVVM architecture, courtuines, livedata, room database, dependency injections etc.
• Another takeaway from hosting this Android Study Jams as facilitator of my campus would be the courage and confidence that I gained to conduct myself for an online event on Youtube and handle it.
• This would be really a memorable event for me because I conducted it when I was physically at my college in my hostel room. Although I was on campus, I still conducted Android Study Jams in online mode so that we could reach a wider audience. We faced so many challenges in the hostel for conducting the event like internet issues, finding a silent room, managing time, exam preparation etc. But still against all odds we effectively completed the event.

Swags!!

• As the facilitator of this entire I program for successfully conducting it, I received a special thank you memento swags and goodies.

• Even the team members who helped me during the course of this entire campaign got their individual Android T-shirt swags.