Mobile devices have given rise to an explosion in creativity over the past several years. There have been exciting, inspiring and incredibly useful software apps in the areas of medicine, music, psychology, senior support, banking, cooking, global health, exploring, travel, shopping, games and many more fields.
These applications have only just scratched the surface of the potential of mobile devices. As our understanding of how mobile technology evolves, many new possibilities will occur to each of us. As new sensors and other capabilities are added to the phones and made available as external devices, ever-more clever ways of helping humans will be created.
The purpose of this course is to create new inter-disciplinary applications of mobile devices. Graduate students from all disciplines at the University of Toronto are invited to take the course for credit. This edition of the course was taught from January - April, 2016.
This is primarily a project-based course in which the goal is to produce a working app by the end of course. Projects were typcially done in groups of 3. Students with computer programming skills were matched with those who brought expertise from other backgrounds to do projects in the latter students’ disciplines.
Who Should Take This Course? Students from all disciplines with expertise!
Students with two kinds of backgrounds should consider taking this course:
1. Students with graduate-level programming skills, typically from the Computer disciplines (ECE and CS and other departments), but possibly from the many other disciplines that make use of computers and that program them. These students will be given exercises to learn the mobile applications development environment, and guidance towards the completion of a major project.
2. Students from any other graduate discipline that have a clear expertise that can be applied within a mobile application. These students will be given lectures and exercises to learn the basic capabilities of mobile devices, and to explore what has already done in their field by way of mobile applications. They will also be trained in the use of tools that can help mock up the visual design of a mobile application. In addition, these students will perform work in their own discipline to show how the new software enhances some aspect of that discipline.
This was the sixth time this course has been taught. You can see if the kinds of projects in this course are of interest to you by looking at the videos and reports of the students from the previous versions of the course (including this version), which you can find here:
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2016
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2015
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2014
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2013
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2012
ECE 1778 Videos and Reports April 2011