Overview

The Android Laboratory is a 32-hours module within the Course on Mobile Application Laboratory, for the undergraduate students of Computer Science and "Informatica per il Management", University of Bologna. The goal of this module is to introduce the basics of mobile applications development for Android-based terminals (e.g. smarphones and tablets). We do not aim at providing an exhaustive insight of the latest releases of the Android platforms. Instead, we aim at presenting the essential concepts of software deployments for mobile and battery-constrained devices, at introducing the main characteristics and components of the Android projects, and at providing the minimum know-how required to develop (from scratch) mobile applications for the Android architecture, at increasing levels of complexity.



Contacts

The lectures on Android will be held by Dr. Luca Bedogni and by Dr. Marco Di Felice. Please contact them: lbedogni@cs.unibo.it , difelice@cs.unibo.it if you have any question about the module. The responsible of the course on Mobile Application Laboratory is prof. Luciano Bononi.



Program and Resources

Here is the (preliminary) program of the Android Module. In the first part of the module, we introduce the Android architecture, and we describe the core components of an Android application, i.e.: Activities, Resources, Intents, Widget and Events, Broadcast Receivers, Notifications. In the second part of the module, we show how to deploy more-sophisticated mobile applications that might -for instances- offer geo-localization functionalities (through Google Maps API), utilize network connectivity (through Bluetooth API), interact with sensors (through the Arduino platform), etc. Although the main focus is on Android-smartphones, we will provide some lectures on Android-programming for tablet devices. For each lecture, we provide the slides and some application examples.



Books


Projects

In the following, we provide possible hints for the project, strongly enouraging the students in adding new features and additional customizations to the proposed applications:



Links

Here is a list of Android related videos. With this, video, you'll see how Android could cooperate and communicate with platforms such as Andruino and NFC tags.

Here is a list of related courses on the Android platforms held in other Italian universities, and also of on-line tutorials on Android software development: