Concept, Implementation and Evaluation of a Virtual Learning Environment for Acquiring Competences in Android App Development

Abstract

The presented project provides a virtual learning environment for university courses teaching app development using Android and Kotlin. It features both self-guided lessons and associated tests as well as practical app development tasks and associated self-assessed programming exercises. The well-known Moodle plug-in Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) serves as a starting point for the latter part. VPL gets extended by means for the usage of the Gradle build tool, the Android SDK tools and AndroidX tests for unit tests at the level of Android activities and fragments. In particular, the rather excessive resource requirements of the Gradle tool created numerous problems in the sandboxes used by VPL. These issues were addressed by configuring suitable VPL settings. In addition, problems associated with the proper usage of these settings had to be addressed in VPL. In order to evaluate whether the virtual learning environment suits the student’s need for learning app development, a questionnaire was designed that contains questions about the course in general and about the design, handling and the benefits of the exercises The answers of the students to this questionnaire confirm that the proposed virtual learning environment provides a suitable means for learning in the described field.