As users of iPhones, Androids and other smartphones continue to increase, mobile applications are seeing their own boost in popularity. According to The Flint Journal, college students are capitalizing on this new marketplace. The Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) was one of a handful of colleges mentioned in the article for supporting this trend by offering app-design courses.
“The smartphone and tablet phenomenon has opened an easy business door for young entrepreneurs who are tech-savvy, creative and use apps themselves but who don’t want to take big financial risks,” the article said.
According to Deloitte, sales of smartphones and tablets will outsell computers for the first time in 2011. By 2015, the total number of mobile app downloads is expected to reach 48 billion. This data alone serves as justification for the Syracuse iSchool’s app-design course.
The mobile application development course, taught by Assistant Professor Carlos Caicedo, covers the design, interface building, resource management, and code elaboration aspects of mobile applications. Students learn how to work with software and hardware tools to develop, test, and debug mobile apps. At the conclusion of the course, the students present the process they followed to develop the app and a demonstration of how each app works.
In addition to teaching the mobile application class, Professor Caicedo is the director of the Center for Convergence and Emerging Network Technologies (CCENT). He has a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and holds M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. His research interests are in the areas of new wireless markets and technologies and security for future data environments.