Intro to Android Workshop
I recently had the opportunity to run a workshop at Make School about Android development. In this post, I’ll share a high level summary of the presentation, along with the video recording of the whole session for those who are interested. There were three main parts for the talk:
- Intro to Android
- Intro to Kotlin
- Building an Android app, the Memory Game
Intro to Android
There are many opportunities in the world of Android due to its unique combination of usage and flexibility. Android is the most popular operating system in the world, it has adapted beyond mobile to include things like Android Auto and Facebook Portal, and the ecosystem is still in a period of rapid change today.
Intro to Kotlin
We didn’t spend much time on Kotlin, but the main idea here is that Kotlin is the preferred language for Android development. Some of the benefits of Kotlin over Java include:
- Immutability (val vs var)
- Null checks are compile-time (instead of run-time)
- Type inference
Building an Android App, the Memory Game
The Android app we built emulates the “Memory” game that many of us played in childhood. The idea is to find matching cards while flipping over cards two at a time. The game requires a memory of where cards were seen earlier so that future pairs are easier to find.
The concepts we covered included: building the UI using ConstraintLayout, responding to user events, and writing the game logic. The video recording of the whole session is an hour and a half long. Let me know if you have any questions!
Attribution
- The memory game and code written are inspired from Paul Hegarty’s CS193P iOS Development class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71pyOB4TPRE
