Acquiring Android app development skills in a virtual learning environment: extending the virtual programming lab for Moodle towards self-assessed app development tasks employing Android and Gradle

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 Altogether the proposed virtual learning environment provided a suitable means for learning in the described field as determined by questionnaires send to students.