I finished the first section of the Android Beginner’s Nanodegree just under 2 weeks ago primarily feeling like I wasn’t making a whole lot of progress towards making any kind of real app. That has definitely changed now.

The pace and pressure of the course definitely stepped up, with a significant portion of the last 2 sections on Object oriented Java involving quite a bit of “add this thing we never told you how to do using the resources we have taught you to use.” It’s a nice touch to have, ensuring the student can navigate the android developers pages as well as utilize StackOverflow for help. The classes can never teach every last thing, and any developer has to be well versed in discovering things for themselves.

However, the presentation surrounding the materials is still rather boring, if not childish at times.

Meet the instructors…(sigh)

But teachers will always have a hard time trying to keep things fun, even when they don’t need to, so I’ll just move on to talking about the 3 main apps I made during this course.

Jiu Jitsu Sparring Scorekeeper App

Throughout this course, you’re primarily working on a very basic “coffee ordering app” which I will get to as my second app. However, you regularly do take breaks away from this to toy with some other features or even make a whole other application with some of the new tools.

This starts with the guided build of a basketball score keeping app with a simple interface and buttons that increment a score for both teams. After this is built, the first app project is issued and requires making an additional scorekeeper app. A student could get away with meeting the rubric for the project making something nearly identical to the guided app, but I pushed myself to utilize a slightly more advanced layout.