For High School Students: This course, in its latest offering, during summer 2014, expanded to the use of sensors in smart phone Apps. Students used Processing and Java to develop apps for our Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS). The 9 Apps may be found here: Sensor Museum Apps. The latest syllabus is found here. In its earlier course offerings, during summers 2012 and 2013, showed the students two different ways for developing Apps, viz., using App Inventor and Java-based Android APIs. The former is good for prototyping, while the latter is ideal for the final integrated App. The students worked in groups of three and compared the two on certain performance metrics (power dissipation, code size, and user interface) for a given fun or game App that they implemented. The syllabus is found here. This was a dual-enrollment course offered under FAU’s ESP (Engineering Scholars Program) program to high achieving high school students comprised of rising 11th and 12th grade students.
For Undergraduate Students: Software-Hardware CoDesign. During fall 2014, it is our desire to bring together students from electrical engineering, and computer science and engineering, and possibly from education, to develop Apps of relevance to Children’s Services Council (CSC) of Broward County. They have after-school programs for middle school students. Our goal is to develop sensor-based Apps for empowering these students and also teach them STEM material. The two syllabi are here: Smart Sensors and Software-Hardware CoDesign. During spring 2014, the course focused on building Android building blocks for museum applications. This involved using sensors and hierarchical design for building a framework to navigate from the museum layout to themes to individual exhibits and back. A paper will be published on it soon. During fall 013, This engineering course was jointly taught with courses in anthropology, arts, and urban planning. Business students have participated in the past. Students developed smart phone Apps for urban and environmental planning. The Apps are documented here: https://bitbucket.org/shankarfau/profile/teams . This course, in its earlier course offering, during summer 2012, was a joint eLearning course. In this setting, two professors,one each from engineering and arts taught his group of students, with the two sets of students coming together after a mid-term exam to develop smart phone prototype Apps based on Android operating system (OS). A group of engineering and graphics professionals reviewed the student team presentations online. Their team blog site links are posted at our Android resource site. The syllabus is found here. The professionals’ evaluation rubric is found here.
For Graduate Students (in Engineering and in the MFA program): Android Components. This course has been offered thrice recently. In the latest course offering during spring 2014, the focus was on autocode generation using EMF, as was with the summer 2012 course offering. Students developed new software components that undergraduate students could use (in a later semester) for developing their prototype Apps. Since these components need to be rugged for use by others, we used auto code generation techniques (using Eclipse Modeling Framework, or EMF) to generate most of the code, from the student’s UML class diagrams. Their team blog site links are posted at our Android resource site. The syllabus is found here. Slides from our IEEE Syscon 2014 workshop on EMF is found here: http://csi.fau.edu/courses/auto-code-generation/
We recently submitted two papers. The ASEE paper has been accepted. The eLearning paper is undergoing review.