Your First Kotlin Android App: An App From Scratch

Hello everyone and welcome to the first course on learning Android development with kotlin. If you’ve be looking for where to start learning android development then this course is definately for you. This course assumes that you have no programming or android development experience because we would be starting from scratch and work our way up into building a complete android app.

For this course, you’ll learn how to build a simple but fun game called Bullseye, where the player is tasked with guessing the target value using a slider. This course is meant for folks at all levels of programming. It’s good for experienced developers if you’re just new to kotlin and Android. And it’s also good for people who’ve never programmed at all.

You’ll create Bullseye using the Kotlin programming language and you’ll also use xml for building the interfaces.

We’ll begin by learning what Kotlin and Android are. You’ll get to know why most modern apps use the Kotlin programming language and what Android really means from a developer’s perspective .

Then you’ll download and setup Android Studio and install all the components necessary to start developing android apps.

Next, you’ll create the basic user interface for the the bull’s eye app. You’ll do this using both xml, which is a markup language, and the design view.

Then, in next part, you’ll learn how to connect the layout you created to Kotlin code to add interactivity. You’ll do this by learning how to work with something called an “Activity” in android. You’ll finish the app by displaying a pop up dialog whenever a button is tapped.

Finally, you’ll learn about the basics of the Kotlin programming language. You’ll learn about variables, functions, classes and other language features. You’ll learn to work with the Kotlin standard library which provides lots of tools for us so we dont have to reinvent the wheel for common functionalities.

Then you’ll learn about conditional statements like the if/else statements. And along the way you’ll learn how to refactor your code to reduce the amount of lines of code it takes to implement a functionality.

This course is designed to be hands-on where we’ll be building the app together step by step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the exercises, but actually follow along. Open up Android Studio, type along with me and run the app we’ll be building in an emulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.

In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own. It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a lot by doing this. Because, there is a big difference between knowing the path and actually walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.

It is my sincere belief that this course, and those that follow in our Android Beginners learning path, can turn you from a complete newbie into an accomplished Android developer. But you do have to put in the time and effort. By making this course, we’ve done our part. The rest is up to you!!!

I’m super excited to start this off and I believe you are too. So let’s blast off into our Android adventure by taking a look at what exactly Kotlin and Android are. I’ll see you in the next one.