A little something for the weekend

I signed up for an online course on learning to create Android applications this weekend. The course is Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1 and runs for approximately four weeks.

This isn't my first foray into online courses, I have completed a Software as a Service course and a Music Production course (thinks: I must look into a photography course as some point as well).

I've signed up fairly late to the course, so am busy setting up the development environment as well as listening to the lectures. It is only supposed to take 4-5 hours a week to do.

The development environment I'm going to use is the Android Studio, although the course recommends Eclipse (I've used Eclipse a few times before, and the Android Studio is relatively).

The emulated Hello Android Application

So far I have installed the main development environment, created and ran a basic "Hello World" application on my phone, and am setting up the emulated devices so that I can simulate running on other "phones".

The format of the course is a number of videos (with questions built in) followed by quizzes. There may be other things associated, but I'll discuss them later.

First of the quizzes completed today, and somehow I managed to get 100%. Good enough to start with. Last time I did one of these courses, I created a spreadsheet with my scores and a prediction of what result I should get. I'm not sure if I can be bothered to do that this time (unless I get some encouragement).

I'm also thinking about signing up for the signature track, this will give me an exciting certificate to wave at people. I'll have to look at the cost and what the extras are worth to me before committing myself. I do have two weeks to decide.

There are some labs I still need to look at, I'll use my spare time to work through those tonight.

The only thing I'm worried about is finding around 5 hours a week to watch the lectures, carry out the lab exercises, and complete the quizzes.