[MUSIC]

Hello and welcome.

My name is Ben, and I'm excited to show you more fun and

fundamental concepts of developing Android apps.

First things first, this course builds on the skills you learned in

the previous course here on building a simple Android app.

I highly recommend that take that course if you haven't already.

I've added the link to it in the teacher's notes if you need to check it out.

When I was a kid,

one of my favorite types of stories were choose your own adventure style books,

where you could make a decision at the end of every page or two, and experience

a bunch of different paths of the story, all leading to different exciting endings.

I remember sometimes making the wrong choice, and

winding up with an ending I was unhappy with.

And I'd go backward or retrace my steps to try and find a happier ending.

For a while, these kinds of books were my absolute favorite, and

I would always get them from a library or sometimes write my own.

My own kids are now getting into these stories.

In fact, I found one of my old books in my basement,

and then lately have been reading it with my eldest son.

Now when I thought about the things I wanted to teach in this course,

I realized that this style of book was perfect for

covering some really important things for developing Android apps.

We can use it to illustrate some key components of Android like displaying

images, getting input from the user, moving from one activity to another, and

how to model our story data using the popular model view controller,

or MVC pattern for software development.

Check out what we're going to build.

Our interactive story app will be named Signals From Mars.

The story will start by asking the user's name, which we'll save and

insert a few times in the text of the story.

Each page of the story will have an image, some text, and two choices at the bottom

allowing the user to navigate different paths in the story.

Our story will be very simple, with only a few steps.

But we'll build it in such a way that it'll be easy to extend for

more complex stories with more choices at each step.

I had a lot of fun preparing this course and

I hope you have a lot of fun taking it.

Let's dive in.