ENG1003: Engineering Mobile Apps

12% - Pre-lecture Quizzes: The pre-lecture quizzes tested the content covered in pre-readings. I'm pretty sure that the majority of students just used control-f to work their way through all of these quizzes. They were not particularly difficult but some questions had some confusing wording.

10% - Assignment 1: Height Measurement App. Teams were given a skeleton/template code which showed the camera of a smartphone. Then teams then had to write an app which could be used to estimate the height of an object. This required use of the orientation sensor to pick up angles of elevation and some trigonometry to tie it all together. 7% was allocated to the code and 3% was for an oral presentation about how the team put the code together.

30% - Assignment 2: Route Tracking App. Teams got skeleton code which showed a map on the phone screen, and then had to build an app that would use GPS to plot out walking routes. When looking at previously saved routes, the app needed to be able to optimise routes and remove unnecessary portions of routes. The code was worth 16%, an oral presentation was worth 6%, and some technical documentation (user guide, project management plan) was worth 8%. I've put some more information about assignments and screenshots below!

8% - In Class Assessment: Week 8 had a software design report, which was supposed to be completed in an hour. We had to discuss the pros and cons of a diagram used for a flight booking program. Week 10 had a black box testing exercise where you needed to find bugs in code which was supposed to parse the text in names.

40% - Exam: The exam was a hurdle (45%) and was open book. The exam was not hard if you knew your stuff, but it was long so answering all the questions took most of the three hours. It was split into three sections: IT Concepts, Javascript and Software Engineering. As it was open book, the majority of students ended up printing out all of the pre-readings and using that throughout the exam.

This was another brand new unit launched by the engineering faculty for first year students. I praised ENG1002 for how well it was run, but I don't think I can say the same for this unit. The content was fairly interesting for those who like IT and are interested in app development. The IT Concepts section was quite good and learning to code in JavaScript think was quite satisfying and rewarding. Software engineering was a little dry though. It's important to note that all the coding in this unit was done in JavaScript and all the apps we made were web apps.

Lectures were okay. Michael definitely knows his stuff and the first few lectures were quite good as he introduced coding to us and showed all of its benefits and difficulties. However, as the semester progressed some lectures felt quite dry when he spent long periods of time demonstrating coding in the JavaScript playground. A lot of people actually found it better to watch the lectures online as it allowed them to pause the lecture and try out some of the code which was being demonstrated, then continue when they were ready. On top of that, some of the concepts in Software Engineering felt extremely basic so you didn’t actually gain too much from going to the lecture on top of what you learnt from the pre-reading.

Practical classes were alright - the content covered during lectures was usually worked on during these sessions. Each team was given a Motorola G 2nd Generation smartphone to use in the first week. I didn’t end up using it though since all the exercises could just be tested on my own android phone anyway. Some of the exercises that we completed in the practical classes felt quite in line with what the assignments were requiring of us, but some exercises we had to complete felt like they had absolutely no relevance to the assignment and were just there to fill time and boy the 3 hours can go very slowly in the computer labs.

Team work and assignments is where I really, really disliked this unit. Just like ENG1002, all students did a Belbon personality survey and teams were apparently put together based on team attributes of different members. It did not work and I ended up with two people who didn't do the quiz and there was really no sign of teamwork in my team except for maybe the oral presentations. However, I don’t think this was an issue which was specific to my group. It seemed like most teams were not very cooperative – maybe due to the nature of the unit. In ENG1002, team members could feel involved and make a genuine contribution simply by measuring the mass of a lamp, by starting a stopwatch or by soldering a cable together – by doing the simple tasks. But in ENG1003 there really weren't any simple tasks. It was you either understand the coding and how to use JavaScript, or you don’t and you do absolutely nothing in your team.

The assignments were terrible when working in teams. From discussion from many other groups, most of the assignment were handled by one person in the team and no one else did anything else. In my team, I was the one who ended up doing all the coding for both assignments. It was just poorly planned out - I don't think teamwork suits these sort of topics very well and people could have probably been pushed more and learnt more if we had to work individually. Furthermore, there was no peer assessment for 1003. Unlike 1002 where your marks were scaled up or down based on how you think your teammates did, there was no way to recognise those who put in the hours into getting the apps done. Everyone got the exact same mark, and all of my teammates received pretty high marks for their assignments with minimal effort. The same happened for most groups.

I really hope they do something about this. It was the engineering faculties idea to force us to do a lot more teamwork, but it did not work for this unit. So that's where my 2.5 rating comes from. I enjoyed about half of it, which was the content, concepts and the rewarding feeling you get from actually getting code to work. But the other half, which involved teamwork and assignments really spoiled the unit. It had a lot of potential but it ended up leaving a lot of the first year engineering cohort with a poor experience. Out of the three brand new engineering units (ENG1001, ENG1002, ENG1003), this definitely needs the most work to make it better for students.

Anyway, my review sort of turned into a rant but I'm just being honest... so I'll finish it here and leave you with some screenshots of the app we made so you can have a feel for what came out of the assignments:

Michael Wybrow

None. Brand new unit but there was a sample exam released.

2.5/5

Yep! With screen capture!

2x1hr lecture, 1x3hr practical

2015, S1

87 HD