A Web-based Collaborative Training System for Developing Smartphone Applications

Abstract

Smartphone applications have increasingly received attention from the industry and academia. Examples of smartphone applications include local business finders (e.g., OpenRice), social networking (e.g., Facebook) and games (e.g., Angry Birds). Development of smartphone applications becomes an important skill set for IT professionals. This project aims at establishing a Web-based collaborative training system for developing smartphone applications. Our system will provide comprehensive self-learning materials that cover the entire development life cycle, programming skills on the popular smartphone platforms, and advanced programming techniques. To encourage collaboration among students and active learning, registered system users are able to add new materials to our system and edit its content to include the state-of-the-art techniques. This project is beneficial for our students, staff and CityU in many ways, because it (1) promotes collaborative, self- and active learning at CityU, (2) provides our graduates with better career and entrepreneurial opportunities, (3) cultivates students’ creativity through building innovative smartphone applications, (4) provides resources for our staff to help their students to build smartphone applications for class assignments and final year projects, (5) establishes server-side hardware and software infrastructure to support client-server smartphone applications, and (6) showcases students’ creative smartphone applications to the public to promote CityU’s image."