Teaching app development in computer science?

[supportman]

I've had a request from our computer science department to install some software to help the kids learn app development.

 

Its android studio and seems really bloated and complicated as well as having a number of other issues such as installing to the user settings folder.

 

So what do other people use to teach app development? I'm looking for alternatives.

[Primus]

I don't mean to be rude but isn't this the tail wagging the dog? If they want to teach using Android Studio isn't it up to us as technicians to provide the tool requested?

 

We don't know but they may have written a curriculum using Android Studio or perhaps purchased one.

[synaesthesia]

I don't mean to be rude but isn't this the tail wagging the dog? If they want to teach using Android Studio isn't it up to us as technicians to provide the tool requested?

 

We don't know but they may have written a curriculum using Android Studio or perhaps purchased one.

 

And they may well have done, but perhaps shouldn't have done so without the IT team's prior support and involvement. "We've bought this software, it only works on Macs, so we expect a suite of Macs to suddenly appear". It doesn't and shouldn't work like that.

[Primus]

And they may well have done, but perhaps shouldn't have done so without the IT team's prior support and involvement. "We've bought this software, it only works on Macs, so we expect a suite of Macs to suddenly appear". It doesn't and shouldn't work like that.

 

To be fair they're using industry standard software that's free - they're not asking for anything unreasonable.

 

Your example involving Macs is totally different!

[synaesthesia]

To be fair they're using industry standard software that's free - they're not asking for anything unreasonable.

 

Your example involving Macs is totally different!

 

No it's not - a perfectly good example, all software requests should come through IT first to ensure compatibility, feasibility, security etc.

[Primus]

No it's not - a perfectly good example, all software requests should come through IT first to ensure compatibility, feasibility, security etc.

 

No your example involved hardware purchases. The software in the case at hand is free and available on Windows.

 

Oh and the request has been made - the technician is looking for alternatives but if the course/qualification/scheme of work requires Android Studio then this isn't appropriate.

[RLR]

We installed android studio this year for our Computer Science course. Not sure if they're actually using it yet though. The installation is quite large but quite straight forward. Each user has to set their own settings which is the only annoying part. There is an option to import settings but I couldn't find a way to do this via command line.

 

android-studio-ide-183.5692245-windows.exe /S /Allusers

 

mkdir "C:\AndroidSDK"

Edited December 12, 2019 by RLR

[supportman]

Xamarin has also been mentioned but as far as I can tell it also needs android SDK installed. Gets very complicated!

[supportman]

We installed android studio this year for our Computer Science course. Not sure if they're actually using it yet though. The installation is quite large but quite straight forward. Each user has to set their own settings which is the only annoying part. There is an option to import settings but I couldn't find a way to do this via command line.

 

android-studio-ide-183.5692245-windows.exe /S /Allusers

 

mkdir "C:\AndroidSDK"

 

I'd be very interested if you can get it working for multiple users. We had all kinds of issues with selecting the SDK when I tried it the first time.

Edited December 12, 2019 by supportman

[RLR]

I'd be very interested if you can get it working for multiple users. We had all kinds of issues with selecting the SDK when I tried it the first time.

Possibly. We've not tested it. I do have this in my install folder but not part of the install script. I created this a while a go so no sure what it was for:

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Environment]"ANDROID_HOME"="C:\\AndroidSDK"