Android Development for Beginners

Lesson 1: Building layouts

Take your hand drawn app designs and lay them out on the phone screen. In this lesson you’ll learn the XML markup language used to lay out Android applications. You’ll create views, the basic building block of Android layouts, that display text and images. Then you’ll position your text and images on these screens. This highly interactive lesson encourages experimentation through coding challenges in Udacity’s XML Visualizer.

Practice Set 1

Create a birthday card application for your phone. You’ll start by installing Android Studio, a program used by professional developers to make Android applications. You’ll then transfer a simple application you create from your computer to your phone. Following that, you’ll take all the concepts you learned in Lesson 1 to build your birthday card app, and install it on your phone for your friends and family to see.

Lesson 2: Making an App Interactive

Harness the power of Java to create an interactive coffee ordering app! You’ll start by writing simple statements in Java that add interactivity to your app. You’ll then incorporate buttons to trigger events. You’ll finally use a fundamental concept in programming, a variable, to keep track of all the coffee drinks ordered.

Practice Set 2

Reinforce the skills learned in Lesson 2 by creating a basketball score tracker. The first part of the practice set will solidify how to write and use variables before creating your basketball score tracker app.

Lesson 3: Work with the Android Framework and Control Flow

Take a deeper dive into the Android Framework to complete the Just Java coffee ordering app! You’ll see in more detail how Android works behind the scenes and take your first steps towards learning Object Oriented Programming. You’ll add the ability to add toppings to your coffee, and show a detailed order summary when the customer purchases a coffee.

• Katherine Kuan - Katherine Kuan is a Developer Advocate at Google. Before that, she was a software engineer on the Android Apps team for Google Keep, Google Play, and the People app (formerly Contacts). She is enthusiastic about helping others build apps to improve their communities.
• Kunal Chawla - After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, Kunal worked as a programmer for three years, but then decided to switch gears to education. He taught middle school science, worked with Google on a distance learning initiative, and eventually earned a master’s degree in educational technology from Stanford University before joining Udacity.