![](\"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/p\/ald_android.jpg\")
\r\nOn Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on\r\na couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech\r\nby having women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff. This is the first of a pair of blog posts talking about what we got up to.<\/p>\r\n \r\n
During the day, Karen Petrie (of Dundee University) and I ran an Android\r\nworkshop – this was a mixture of talk & play, with the attendees building\r\napps using AppInventor and learning about the basics of Android development. I\r\nwas in charge of the talky bits (five short talks on various aspects of mobile\r\ndev, scattered throughout the day) and Karen was in charge of the hands-on\r\nAppinventor bits, but it was very much a double act; I helped out in the\r\npractical bits, Karen chipped in in the talky bits.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I found it great fun presenting with Karen – we know each other fairly well,\r\nbut have never worked together on anything like this. We were somewhat\r\nunder-coordinated (we only saw each other’s slides about 20 minutes before we\r\nstarted the workshop!) but through a mixture of extreme sarcasm and Agile\r\npresentation methodologies we managed to pull it off. The day worked\r\nbrilliantly, and going on the attendees’ feedback questionnaires, I’m not the\r\nonly one who enjoyed myself. Here’s a photo of one of the groups contemplating app development:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n
The first app attendees built was\r\nan extension of the “standard” Google example app, or “HelloPurr”. In this app\r\nyou learn how to add a button, include a photo, include a sound, listen for the\r\naccellerometer, and then you link the playing of the sound to either pressing\r\nthe button or shaking the phone. Or in layperson’s terms, you make something\r\nthat meows when you touch or shake it. The very short video below shows what\r\nhappens when everyone gets their devices meowing at the same time…<\/p>\r\n\r\n