Starting this year, Mississippi State University students have an opportunity to learn how to program applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch in three new class.
One of the classes, Field Study in Entrepreneurship, is taught by four teachers: Rodney and Allison Pearson and Robert and Melissa Moore.
Professor of business information systems Rodney Pearson said groups of students will develop an application for the iPhone or iPod Touch in the class.
“That is one of the things that we’ve stressed from the beginning, is that an entrepreneurial activity is a business, and it requires a number of different skills,” he said. “The actual development of the computer program is only one of the many skills.”
Pearson said an application must be attractive, functional and satisfy a need.
Marketing professor Melissa Moore said there is an equal partnership between the four teachers.
“We’ve currently been talking more about management governance which is Allison Pearson’s area, and a lot of the technical components, of course which is Rodney Pearson,” she said. “We’re talking about marketing research [Wednesday], talking about how to conduct a focus group, actually gather your own research and doing your own research that you can’t just go online and find a statistic for, so that’s where myself and Robert Moore step in.”
Travis Ann Nylin, a senior electrical engineering major and member of the class, said there are four areas of responsibilities each group must focus on.
“We have a technical expert and they needed to have programming expertise,” she said. “The marketing expert has to have an understanding of consumer needs and wants […] and the ability to guide product design, visual design and the product names.”
She said the communication expert must have a knowledge of business relations and the ability to do graphic designs.
“The business analyst has to conduct the market analysis and identify trends, and also project oversight and the coordination of team activities,” Nylin said.
A member of her group, sophomore biomedical engineering major Ashton Holton, said their group is designing an application that takes quizzes from the iPhone store and keeps them all in one place.
“On top of the quizzes, we plan on having miniature games and all sorts of other just fun little tidbits of things that people – freshmen in college who are just bored going to Starbucks or kids who are in class in high school – can just be sitting playing around with that stuff,” he said.
Another new class this semester is a one-hour a week freshman experience class on programming for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Pearson said no programming background is required for the class, and a student from any major could take the class.
“We want to show some students who wouldn’t have even considered a computing major that computing really can be interesting and fun,” he said.
He said the class teaches students how to write beginning programs and deploy them to their phones.
“We do have an assignment every week and the assignments in that class are very, very step-by- step,” Pearson said. “[The assignments] tell them exactly what to do because there is no way they would know what to do otherwise.”
Freshman business information systems major Casey Robertson said he thinks the class is appealing to students.
“It’s something that most people can apply to, like everyone enjoys music, everyone has nicer phones today, so it’s something that most people can enjoy and get something useful from,” he said.
Pearson said the third class, Special Topic in BIS – iPhone/iPod Programming, is a class that assumes a prior programming background.
“The senior level class assignments aren’t nearly as step-by- step,” he said. “Their assignments will tell them, ‘Develop an application to do so and so,’ and they’re supposed to design the application and develop it on their own.”
Pearson said one previous semester of object-oriented-programming would be sufficient.
Austin Dear, junior business information systems major and campus Apple representative, took the class when it was first offered in the spring and said Objective C is used to write applications for the iPhone.
“It’s one of those classes that you can actually see yourself applying it in real life even now, because the iTunes store allows anyone to develop any app and put it in the world wide market place,” he said.