Mobile Computing & Security Laboratory Development

Android has reached over 1 million devices and occupies 85% of the market in 2014, according to a recent market report. Due to many advantages of the Android platform, such as open source, Google support, advanced software programmable framework in popular programming language Java, Android has been and will remain as the most popular mobile device operating system in market. Due to large popularity of user markets, research study of mobile computing is raising to a challenge level. In addition, the number of malicious applications is increasing continually. All these reasons raise a high challenge to computer science researchers and educators. How to build the next generation of workforce that are equipped with techniques and problem solving capabilities in the mobile pervasive computing and security has drawn attentions to researchers and STEM educators. As a collaborative effort supported by NSF program, this paper presented a laboratory development conducted in computer science program at Alabama A&M University regarding to mobile computing and security issues. In addition, class studies that apply the laboratories to classroom teaching using flip-flop are briefly discussed. Several interesting observed experimental results that demonstrated a relation between project based learning (PBL) and flip teaching through an online environment were presented in the end. These studied were facilitated by the mechanisms provided by Blackboard.