Android Studio in Academic Environment

[Dave Hall]

Hello. I am the sysadmin for a University Computer Science Department. Some faculty are interested in teaching Android programming using Android Studio. We would like to find a way to install Studio in such a way that the students in a class all use the same (network shared) copy of a fixed development environment. This would be similar to a commercial app development environment where consistency is required across a team of a dozen or more developers.

If there is documentation on this type of setup please share a link.

Thanks.

-Dave

 

[Deleted User]

There are a couple of ways you could potentially do this.

- Using a Virtual Machine (VM).
- Using a Docker image containing Android Studio.

The project workspace could be populated from code stored on Github (or equivalent server hosted locally), if you want the students to work collaboratively on projects.

 

[Dave Hall]

Whether VM, docker, or invoking directly from file server share, the main objective is to set up a read-only static Studio environment that the user's can't change or update. This allows consistency for both instruction and grading. (We do similar for Python and Ruby environments.) Of course, we'd upgrade/update between semesters.

We're also trying to reduce storage requirements - in a Linux environment we've seen both the Android and the .android directory trees grow quite large - 5+ GB.

Thanks.

-Dave