Task 0 – Self-Exploration
Review the Week 4 “Content Slides” about the “Mobile Ecosystem”. Write down how you would
answer the following question:
“What is the mobile ecosystem?” (100-200 words).
Objective: Construct the Reflex Checker App
Let us imagine that you are a HCI researcher trying to understand how humans respond to mobile
user interfaces that scroll vertically. You imagine an App that tests “interactivity speed” by asking a
user to complete randomly generated “checkbox selection tasks” as quickly as possible. You are
doing this because you want to find out if age is important factor behind interactivity speed.
You decide that your App will use a set of randomly chosen names of drinks and fruits. You want the
App to randomly ask the user three different tasks: 1) select all items, 2) deselect all items, 3) select
one item. You also add in randomly selected images to spare out the check boxes. Here is an
example of what the final App could look like:
Task 1 – Setup the project – FrameLayout, resources, formatting
1. Create a new “Empty Activity” Android Studio project called ReflexChecker. Setup its package
name as au.edu.jcu.cp3406.reflexchecker. Set the API level at 19. Be careful to check the folde
location since Android Studio remembers the previous folder location ?
2. Adjust the MainActivity’s layout as follows:
a. Replace the ConstraintLayout with a FrameLayout
b. Adjust its TextView as follows: remove unnecessary constraint attributes, set its margins
to be 16dp, layout_width matching its parent, layout_height wrapping its content and
add the following text directly to its text attribute:
Android Studio should tell you that directly adding text like this is not “best practice”
3. So “extract string resource” and move the text into strings.xml. Name this new string resource
“instructions”.