Here we are about to launch into Remote Learning. I suspect some of you are excited, no more having to go to campus for 2-1/2 hours on Wednesday evenings, and some of you are less than excited for a variety of reasons. I’m somewhere in the middle. There is some freedom from the schedule, and some different ways we can approach things in this situation. The big downside is that we are not there in-person to do them together.

We have two projects left on our original schedule and I’m going to keep them both as the focus of our remaining seven weeks. We also have a presentation scheduled for finals week. That one will take a little tweaking. Here’s my plan on how we finish things off.

  • The last two projects will continue as planned, see the notes below.

  • Regular class meetings will be replaced with videos and readings. Some videos will be from me, but many if not most will be curated ones from “The Internets” and focused on the topic of the week. The goal is for these to help you with your final project and get an idea what you can do with apps.

  • I will have weekly “class chat” and “office hours” where I will be on Zoom (our video platform) from 6:00 to 7:00 Wednesday evenings. This will be a time when we can catch up, ask questions about the assigned videos and about your projects. We won’t be covering material in these, attendance is not required. The link to these meetings will be in Blackboard. I will send another announcement when I have that set up so you know exactly where to find them.

The Projects

Project 2 - Android Task List - I’ve got this one on my list to complete grading for you. I hope to have this done in the next few days. The extra week sorta-kinda helped many of you, but for me it just pushed it to this week and weekend when I have to put some time into thinking how to revamp things for us.

Project 3 - Hybrid Task List - I started in working to make a series of videos on React Native, and they were going to be awesome. Then I found a fellow on YouTube who recently made a series on React and ReactNative where he makes a task list app just like I had planned. These videos will take the place of our next few regular lectures. He also has a series on React itself for you to get some background in the framework. These videos are linked from the class Schedule page. Watch these before you ask questions about React or React Native.

Project 4 - Your App Here - This is an app of your own design. I need from you, in the next two weeks, a proposal of what your app will be. The proposal only needs to be about a paragraph and no more than one page description. Details remain the same and are on Blackboard, the course website, etc. as usual.