An Implementation and Evaluation of Advanced Widgets Topic for Interactive Application Stage in Android Programming Learning Assistance System

Abstract

With the growing popularity of smartphone devices, the demand for mobile application programmers has been increasing, particularly for the most popular mobile platform Android. Then, Android application programming has become one of the most important subjects that students should learn in professional schools and universities in IT departments. To assist self-studies of students, we have developed Android Programming Learning Assistance System (APLAS). To guide students to reach correct answers for given assignments, APLAS adopts the Test-Driven Development (TDD) method to validate student answers automatically using JUnit and Robolectric. The learning model for APLAS consists of four stages where each stage has several topics. In this paper, we implement Advanced Widgets as the second topic in the Interactive Application stage and evaluate it through applications to students in an IT department in Indonesia.