The point of education is to prepare our younger generations for the world that’s to come, opening their minds to the possibilities of the things around them and giving them the tools they need to become great innovators and contributors in modern society. After all, children are the future. Following that line, our decisions on what sort of education to offer become a statement about the sort of future we want to head toward. Keeping that in mind, it’s quite a strong statement that the New Jersey Institute of Technology has begun offering a course of application development specifically for Android.
According to the post over at Android Community, NJIT recently announced that they would be offering an “Android Operating System Application Development” class starting this month. The concept of the class is to allow users to gain access to and familiarity with everything they’ll need to work within the Android 2.2 and higher OS frameworks. This does also mean that the class will be teaching using both the tablet and smartphone environment.
The official NJIT press release gives us some idea why they chose to offer this for Android rather than Apple, citing the fact that “During the past year, Android system have demonstrated a 35 percent increase in market share,” the fact that “Android developers… are not limited to developing for only one hardware manufacturer,” and that “there is a growing competitive opportunity to design and market commercial Android-based apps.”
While still a beginner course (called “an excellent way to get a start on developing applications”), it’s more than we’ve seen elsewhere in app development classes. Of course, it’s also entirely possible that other colleges and universities have already started teaching users how to create for Android or Apple, so if you know of any such institutions, comment to tell us the story!
