Welcome to Mobile Computing

Course Syllabus

Instructors: Victor Miclovich, Moses Mugisha

Office: Appfrica labs & Makerere University (Faculty of Technology)

Office Hours: Any time... feel free to send us an email

Goals of the Course

• Learn how to use mobile applications 
• Programming Mobile phones in Python
• Programming mobile web applications
• Designing mobile services
• Methodologies in software development 

Course Content 

• Mobile technology (An introduction)
• • We look at the history of mobile phones, cellular networks, a few terms that are used in cellular technology
  • Concepts of cells, hexagonal mapping of geographic regions, cell towers, etc.
  • The types of phones out there
  • Mobile operating systems i.e. Symbian OS, Android
  • Mobile phone platforms i.e. J2ME, S60, Android, Black Berry, PyS60
  • • Our focus is S60
    • Python
    • future classes will include a lot more mobile platforms 
• Programming (Generic programming in python, concepts in CS)
• • general programming i.e. history, computers, data types, data structures, application logic, programming paradigms such as structured, object oriented, functional programming
  • Advance programming concepts, i.e. file I/O, network programming i.e. sockets(), twisted libraries, urllib, etc.
  • Problem solving
  • Advanced mathematics and scientific programming i.e. Machine learning 
• Using your mobile phone
• • Mobile applications
  • Connecting to your computer, OTA i.e. over the air, tethered systems which just really means using a cable to connect your phone to computer
  • common day-to-day issues in mobile technology and services 
• Basic PyS60 (Python for Series 60) programming
• • S60 libraries
  • OOP
  • Widgets
  • Mobile web applications (i.e. XHTML, WAP, etc)
  • Networking (peer to peer networks, scatternets, etc)
  • Security (cryptography, sockets layers, threat analysis and exposures, machine learning techniques in detecting threats, mobile phone viruses, etc)
• Case studies
• • We use a case study approach and look at existent open source projects... replicate ideas and learn by doing. The whole idea is to give students real live design problems to solve 
• Independent and group projects 
• • We shall start with group based projects
  • An independent project is done on an individual basis to test the individual's skills 

Textbook

We will be using several texts for the course and additional online material

Mobile Python: Rapid prototyping of application on the mobile platform

By Jürgen Scheible and Ville Tuulos

Publisher: Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-51505-1

"Graded" Course Components

Wiki Participation 

We shall be using Boolean grades here. So, if you miss a lesson, discussion or wiki participation (including Google group participation), you get kicked out i.e. that's Boolean of 0 or False. On the other hand, you stay if you keep up with the work and assignments i.e. Boolean of 1 or True.

Problem Sets and Notebook 

Much of our class time will be spent working in teams and individually on problem sets. These problem

sets form the core of the course. They will encourage you to sharpen your programming skills, team work, and idea creation. 

Project 

Throughout the semester, we will be using many cases (or examples) to increase our understanding of mobile computing.  This work will culminate in a series of projects both individual and group projects.

Examinations 

There won't be any examinations.

Other Information

Preparation, Attendance, and Pacing

This class meets daily (and not on weekends unless you have to or don't have a date) which means that a significant amount of the work for class will be occurring

between classes. In between classes you should ...

•  Read in advance
•  Keep up with other course works in your respective disciplines
•  Watch out for one another... you only have two months to complete this course before I take on another group