UAA-community partnership: Learning to program Android apps

by Kathleen McCoy  |   

Kirk Scott teaches how to build apps for Androids. (Photo by Philip Hall/UAA)

Kirk Scott teaches how to build apps for Androids. (Photo by Philip Hall/University of Alaska Anchorage)

Tracking Kirk Scott down during finals week at UAA was a bad idea. When we met Tuesday to talk about how he introduced Android programming to Southcentral middle and high school students, our interview was interrupted every two minutes by a knock at his office door.

"Welcome to finals week," he said with a tired grin. "This will go on until after 5 p.m. Friday, until they just run out of time." One student wanted to share his latest program; another wanted to explain why a computer crash last night meant he couldn't present a final project today.

Scott takes it all in stride. As tough as finals week is, there are high points. After our interview, he was headed to his favorite final: Students presenting Android apps they'd created.

"This is the closest I will get to being an art teacher," Scott said. "To create art, you need technical skills. To create Android apps, you need two semesters of programming.

"In my course, they make their own project. So 25 people with 25 different personalities make Android apps based on their own creativity. This is fun."

Scott makes the comparison between programming and art with firsthand knowledge. Besides teaching computer science, he is a printmaker, audits art classes at UAA and joined retired UAA art professor and printmaker Garry Kaulitz's local studio.

But we digress: Back to Android programming and kids in Anchorage and Valley schools. Last December, Scott won $10,000 in UAA Innovate funding with a proposal to create new teaching tools based on mobile technology, and to test these with local schools. (He went way beyond that, to a university and an elementary school in Thailand, but more on that in a minute.)

Marla Sanders, a math teacher at Steller Secondary School, works with Steller students on their intensive, an introduction to programming Android apps, lead by UAA computer science professor Kirk Scott and two undergraduates. (Photo courtesy of Kirk Scott/UAA)

Marla Sanders, a math teacher at Steller Secondary School, works with Steller students on their intensive, an introduction to programming Android apps, lead by UAA computer science professor Kirk Scott and two undergraduates. (Photo courtesy of Kirk Scott/University of Alaska Anchorage)

Last May, he partnered with a Steller Secondary School math teacher on a two-week "intensive" on Android programming; these short-term deep dives are a hallmark of Steller's academic program. Part of Scott's grant paid two undergraduate computer science majors to teach java programming; then Steller's students worked on ready-made exercises while Scott and his students served as mentors.

"The Steller students did not learn how to do Android programming in just two weeks," Scott said. "They did begin the process. The whole goal was to get them interested in programming."

Scott's team also worked with a STEM teacher and her students at Wasilla Middle School and a math teacher and his students at Su-Valley High School. The Su-Valley students created flashcards to study for their AP calculus test.

Ultimately, Scott and his undergraduates launched a website that contains open access to three Android app "maker" programs. These allow any student or teacher to create an academic app filled with the content they wish to study or teach. So if a flash card format works (and it does for languages and vocabulary, as the team found out with Russian language flash cards), the site now offers this resource free.

Another option is a multiple-choice app where students get a cue when they have the right or wrong answer. But the version that drew the most excitement was what Scott called "the recipe card." The name morphed into the "Solutions Card," and it can be programmed to reveal, one at a time, step-by-step directions to any complex procedure a teacher wants students to tackle

Or even the not-so-complex. The light bulb really went off for one grade school teacher, Scott recalled. "What are elementary classrooms filled with? Workbooks, loaded with step-by-step instructions...here's how you brush your teeth...."

The eye-opener for Scott and his teaching team was the lack of computer literacy among many of the students they worked with, despite their familiarity and comfort with their devices.

"You've got all these kids who are competent users of technology," Scott said. "You use our programs to create content. But you have to be able to identify kinds of files and to store them in a directory. This is extremely basic stuff, like making a folder on your desktop and putting a jpeg in it. We discovered they don't know how to do this. I was knocked over."

The good news is, now these students know.

Colleagues at Naresuan University in Thailand presented UAA computer science engineering professor Kirk Scott with mementos from Thailand. (Photo by Philip Hall/ UAA)

Colleagues at Naresuan University in Thailand presented UAA computer science engineering professor Kirk Scott with mementos from Thailand. (Photo by Philip Hall/University of Alaska Anchorage)

So back to the link with Thailand. Before he won the Innovate funding, Scott had already visited Naresuan University and started talking up the potential of maker programs. The Thai college students and local schoolteachers were interested. They saw the programs as metaphorical fishing poles; provide the pole and fishing never has to end. They're even looking to create partnerships with Alaska educational institutions.

Scott and one of the undergraduates found funding for a trek to Thailand later this month to deliver finished maker programs. A benefit of the programs is that app contents are separate from the programming; this makes the tool international and universal.

The successful Russian language flashcards also have sparked a new idea. Scott and a colleague in anthropology, Medeia DeHass, will team up to work on Alaska Native language flashcards if their National Science Foundation application wins funding.

UAA Android website, http://math.uaa.alaska.edu/~android/home.shtml

A version of this story by Kathleen McCoy appeared in the Alaska Dispatch News on Sunday, Dec. 14, 2014.

Creative Commons License "UAA-community partnership: Learning to program Android apps" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.