Culturally Relevant Computing Lab Director, Dr. Kinnis Gosha, and Google software engineers, developed a course for Morehouse students to learn Android Application programming, along with the Applied Computer Science(CS) content, and received hands-on experience in a for-credit class. The course, titled “Mobile App Development with Advanced Data Structures,”combined lecture, class discussion and in-class assignments targeted at learning Java, advanced data structures, ADS, and other basics for Android programming. The Applied CS classes ran for 75 minutes and were held twice a week for 16 weeks in the fall semester of 2016. These classes, the first at the university for mobile app development, filled up quickly due to the buzz around the collaboration with Google, and 11 out of 12 students successfully completed the course.
Applied CS content enabled students to understand, apply and implement advanced data types using a mobile application platform that more than two billion devices run on today. The application development skills received provide something tangible that could be used after graduation to create software, products and even companies. “A lot of these students get into computer science because they’re entrepreneurs and they need to understand the platform to generate revenue,” Dr. Gosha says. “Learning coding in a platform-specific environment is a great way to prepare them both for CS or software engineering challenges, and exposes them to processes, and workflows they will encounter when using any platform or system for actually making their code run.”