Android Study Jams
It is estimated that there will be around 216 billion app downloads by the end of 2020. Now if we divide that by the number of days, we get an average of 592 million app downloads per day, why not? Apps do fill in all the gaps in our routine life. If you can’t remember all your daily chores, you will add them in your to do app. If you are having some trouble with numbers, you will use the calculator on your phone. Easy, convenient, one click solutions, that’s what apps are known and used for.
Developer Student Club, DDU hosted an event series, Android Study Jams starting from Friday, 25th December 2020. This 3 day event series was for all the Android app enthusiasts or anyone who wanted to kick start his or her app journey. The workshop focused on starting right from rudimentary steps of app development so that even a rookie can get started. The event series was held on Google Meet platform.
DAY 1
Maliha Nan started the workshop with a brief itinerary for the 3 days and basic instructions. After this, the first speaker, Nitant Joshi took over the workshop and gave a talk on the learning objectives and prerequisites for app development. He talked about the journey from Java to Kotlin and later all the basics and syntax of Kotlin were covered by him. The session was kept interactive and full of real world analogies so that the attendees get the concepts from inception and not get bored at the same time.
The second half of the session was taken over by Shyam Makwana, who helped the participants with the installation process of Android Studio, he tried to cover all the tools of Android Studio and even gave a demo of a dice roller app so that the participants can get an idea of what they will be learning in the following days. Participants were encouraged to work parallelly.
Links to the Code lab and codes were shared. Participants were prompted to make Developer account, explore the site and earn virtual badges. With this, day 1 ended.
DAY 2
Day 2 was commenced by Mansi Kalaria. She took over the session of layouts, designing and styling. She talked about all concepts along with making an About Me app. Participants were encouraged to work on the same app with the speaker so in case if something is missed out, it can be covered there and then. Also working parallelly would help them imbibe the concepts more.
The latter half of the session was conducted by Krishna Sinroja, who covered the concepts of lists. She used a prototype of a scroll-able list for the audience to get a better understanding of the topic.
In the end, feedback links were shared and Day 2 ended with this.
DAY 3
Krishna continued on day 3, she started with the steps to get the apk of an app. Then she made a tip estimator app. It was made from scratch, all the components were explained and at the end links to the code were shared. After this Shyam talked about the life cycle of an app and covered related topics.
The last segment was conducted by Nitant. He started with the concept of fragmentation. He made a Quiz app to help participants understand the concept and even covered the navigation of an app.
To test how much the participants were able to take from the workshop, a quiz was held on the Kahoot app. All the enthusiastic participants performed well. The winners were Tirth Bhalodiya (1st place), Rushi Raval (2nd place) and Parth Dedanya (3rd place). The winner & the first runner up were awarded with Jetbrains Vouchers.
The event ended on a good note. The club received great feedback and this motivated them to keep on working and give more content to the audience.
Resources :
Day 1: Slides — Kotlin Basics, Slides — Android Studio
Day 2: Slides — Session Overview, Slides — Scrollable List
Day 3: Slides — Lifecycle
