How a Lecturer Teach App Development to Chemistry Major Students

Creating an app for a programmer is of course a trivial task. But, how about for those who are not programmer but they want to create an app? Of course this will be a challenge for them.

Something like this occurred in a university at Yogyakarta in Indonesia. Aulia Faqih, a lecturer in UIN Sunan Kalijaga whos has been in the education world for a long time, was given a challenge to teach application development to students of chemistry major in the university.

Those chemistry students want to be trained about programming because they are the future teachers and becoming a teacher is better if you can follow the technology progression including creating Android apps.

Teaching application development to students who ware not majoring in information technology is of course not an easy task. First they need to be thought the basics of programming before they can enter the application coding stage.

Another challenge in teaching these students is they don’t have as much time as IT students in their campus to study about programming. They still need to study their major.

Seeing this challenge, Aulia tried to find a solution for these students so they can learn programming easily in a short time. One of the solution he found is by using Intel XDK app development tool which is provided by Intel for free.

Compared to other app development tool, with Intel XDK, creating Android app become much easier especially for those who have no knowledge about programming before.

Before actually entering the technical part of creating app, Aulia first teach these students about the basics of information technology, app development methode, UI/UX design, to testing app and using Intel XDK.

Aulia said that this process is no easy because the students are still new about this. This can be analogized for example a software engineer enters a chemical lab and he doesn’t has any idea of what the use of the available tools and ingredients in the lab. This is the same when these chemistry students open Intel XDK and they have no idea what is displayed on the screen.

But, with the help of Aulia and Intel XDK, bit by bit these students finally are able to create Android apps. This is because in Intel XDK, programming with code can be minimalized using the app designer feature. Plus because their apps are in the form of learning module, no high coding skill required.

Now, in a relatively short time, Aulia has successfully teached how to create apps to these students. There is already 45 app created and 30 of them have been released in Google Play via Dicoding Store.