Work in Progress: Recruiting Computing Students Through IN-COMMAND CS-0: An INtroduction to COMputing through Mobile ApplicatioN Development

As part of a larger effort to recruit and retain Hispanics in computer engineering, the first author created a weeklong summer course for college students to develop applications for Google's Android mobile phone. Ten students, having little to no prior programming experience, designed and tested applications (apps) for Google's Android platform. Students used a software development environment, complete with a software emulator for the phone to develop the application and a real platform running the Android OS to demonstrate the application. Students were exposed to the main aspects of App development, such as setting up the development environment, Graphical User Interface (GUI) design through the Extensible Markup Language (XML), Multimedia and Graphics programming, Java programming and OpenGL. At the end of the weeklong session, students initiated the development of a Sudoku application for the Android System. Students involved in the weeklong course took a survey based on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), which posits that individuals base career decisions on their confidence, interest, and perceived sense of mastery in a field (Lent, et al 2005). Following the course, students reported increased interest in computing careers and in the computing major, increased confidence that they could succeed in the major, and perceived academic support in their department. Students commented that the structure of the course and real-world problem solving associated with developing apps contributed to their learning. Future efforts will involve developing a full semester course as well as disseminating the curriculum to high school and post-secondary populations.