CodePath Fellows Help Train Their Peers to Develop Android Apps

Two undergraduates have turned a free Android mobile app development course they took into a teaching moment through CodePath.org, a nonprofit organization that offers free software development courses at colleges and universities who support low-income computer science students. 

Kush Patel, a computer science major, and Kimia Naeiji, an information technology major, have just completed their second semester as student “professors” who teach fellow juniors and seniors how to conceptualize and execute a design for an Android app with market potential.

The CodePath Android Studio course was introduced to NJIT in spring 2021 by Baruch Schieber, chair of the computer science department in the Ying Wu College of Computing, with the intent of bringing the nonprofit's mission of making computer science education more inclusive and equitable to campus.

Students who take the for-credit course and score 90% or better are invited to teach it to their peers after a 10-week interview and training session.

According to Patel and Naeiji, the course, which is offered as an elective to computer science juniors and majors, tends to have a few students drop the course when they find out that their grade will be partially determined by student tech fellows. However, enrollees soon discover that their instructors are well prepared to not only teach the curriculum but act as advisors and mentors.

“Gaining trust from students sometimes takes a bit longer for me since I am not only a junior teaching seniors but the only information technology student as well,” said Naeiji. “However, once I convince them that I am indeed qualified, they adapt very quickly and wind up being grateful for the experience,” she adds.

The course is divided into three sections: parts one and two are taught in the first half of the semester, the second half of the semester is devoted to group projects that will be presented and evaluated on Demo Day at the conclusion of the class.

Part one is required and devoted to individual projects that are guided through a series of CodePath produced videos, preceded by class instruction on the content. Part two allows the individual projects to be further developed as optional stories where features are added, bugs are solved and plans put in place for production. Students then upload their work to a GitHub dashboard for review by CodePath.

The group project component requires a series of milestones over a four-week period. During the process, Patel advises on back-end functionality related to coding and API’s while Naeiji oversees front-end development including the user interface.

Patel had a goal to make the learning experience more robust. “I wanted to teach content and not just watch the videos as I did when I took the class,” he said. He also encouraged his students to learn features outside of class on their own. As a result, the apps produced were more complex, which Patel was “very happy to see.”

CodePath has sole responsibility for grading part one; part two and the group projects are a collaboration between the Fellows and Schieber.

The class has been a learning process for the teachers as well as students.

“You learn by teaching. I’ve found new things I didn’t quite get when I took the course,” said Naeiji.

Both instructors have discovered a hidden talent and love for teaching as a result of the class and intend to continue, noting that keeping students engaged is a necessary skill for success. They both say that getting positive student surveys at the end of the term validates their work and passion for shared experience.

“I am very proud of this class. The back end and front end on many projects were high quality and had some very cool features,” said Naeiji.

Demo day is a competition between project teams. Bookzie won first place for overall functionality, design and presentation. The project allows students to view, rank and exchange books among each other on-campus. Future plans include making it available for virtual transactions with other schools. Second place was awarded to Invest.io, a financial literacy app that relies on an Alpaca Market Data API to provide real-time stock information, education on trading and news.

Other projects included Twitter Guesser, which offers games based on your followers; Joy Flick,  a gaming ranking app; Travel Crawler, for reviews and routing of area bars (future releases will include an age verifier and partnership with LYFT for users who are a bit “overzealous”); WeatherWear, for choosing clothes by the weather; Eventir, an aggregation tool for finding all live events in an area; Spectacle, a streaming show and movie database; and Yes Chef, which parses ingredients from blog posts to create meal plans.