App Development Training Course Project

Hello, everyone.. it's been a while since I posted on Dev Shed. My last big project you guys helped me out with was Mupen64Plus AE, which is really turning out great, BTW!

I wanted to let everyone know about a new project I'm working on to create a training course on how to write Android apps. It will be a complete training course with a course book, exercises, quizzes, test booklet, and answer key, as well as a companion website and support forum. It will be geared toward anyone who is interested in learning how to write professional Android apps, whether they have prior programming experience or not.

Each new topic will first be related to real-world concepts, so they can be understood more easily. Then those concepts will be applied to create a practical, interesting demo app for each subject. By the end of the course, the student will have created several of these demo apps, that they can show off to their friends or potential employers.

I thought I'd see if anyone here has suggestions for topics that could warrant special attention in the book, or ideas for the demo apps that will be created throughout the course. Let me know what you think!

I've also set up a kickstarter campaign to help fund the project, to cover the printing costs and compensate for the time I put into it. Feel free to comment on there as well, if you have useful suggestions for the project!

I wrote some examples to demonstrate my basic teaching style.

This first example is what I envision for the first chapter of the course book, which will be teaching XML. This would be the first page of that chapter, and you can see that it makes no assumptions about the student's prior experience. The topic is related to a real-world concept before introducing anything technical:

http://www.paulscode.com/projects/a...son_context.pdf

My second example would be much later in the book, demonstrating my style of explaining the concept clearly before diving into the code. This would be toward the end of the chapter. Obviously by this point in the course, the student will be familiar with Java, so the code parts will be very simple to follow and relate back to the concept being taught:

http://www.paulscode.com/projects/a...n_decisions.pdf

I've added a new reward tier to the kickstarter campaign. Backers can now pick t-shirts. You choose the size and color for the shirt, and pick from any of the designs below. I may add some more t-shirt designs here as well. If anyone is an artist and wants to help out the project, I'll definitely take more t-shirt design suggestions!