Workshop: Tinkering with Android
CNR ISC – Via Taurini 19
Jan 12th-15th 2016
As part of the Alternanza Scuola Lavoro program in which Junior High School students are given work experience, a 4 day workshop on Android programming was held involving around 50 students working in groups in the library at Via Taurini. Eleven PC kindly lent by the CNR Servizi di Reti where turned into diskless kubuntu workstations set up around CNR-IASI servers.
On the final day students developed a non trivial multi-activity app presenting a list of image categories which, on selection, then downloads an appropriate image from the xoart.link web site using an external library (Picasso by square). Almost all students had no prior programming experience and no knowledge of java. The template code created by Android Studio can be quite hard to follow for novices. Tinkering with it, by breaking it in strategic points made it feasible for them to identify the places where to insert appropriate code. All the groups completed the assignment and number showed great enthusiasm and went beyond the required work.
Francis Farrelly, head of ISC’s Training & Technology Transfer project, held the course while IASI’s Bruno Martino helped set up the lab.
