FALL 2025

Teaching

To fulfill its mission, AC-DC carries out challenging human studies, which accrue big data, requiring sophisticated analysis. The skills required for such studies is a superset of the skills required for any other data-driven project.

KEY INFORMATION

Instructors

Grading

Prof. Ioannis Pavlidis (ipavlidis[@]uh.edu) Office Hours: Thu 3-4 pm @ TEAMS
Mert Saritac (mesaritac[@]uh.edu) Office Hours: Wed 12-01 pm @ TEAMS
Hanife Sen (hsen[@]cougarnet.uh.edu) Office Hours: Mon 11-12 pm @ TEAMS

Grading

21% (7 x 3%) Weekly app assignments
45% (3 x 15%) In-class app development exams
34% Semester-long app project

Grade-Thresholds: A >= 93, A- >= 90, B+ >= 85, B >= 80, B- >= 75, C+ >= 70, C >= 65, F < 65

Semester-Long App Project

The project can be done in pairs. Pairs need to be declared by the end of the second week of classes.

App Specification: 20% of the total project grade
- 10% description, 30% user flow, 20% wireframes, 20% mockups, 20% prototype
Beta App: 30% of the total project grade
- 50% robust functionality, 30% user interface, 20% coding excellence
Production App: 50% of the total project grade
- 50% robust functionality, 30% user interface, 20% coding excellence

Day, Time and Room

Thursday, 4:00-7:00 pm @ 315-Health and Biomedical Sciences Building 1 and @ TEAMS

Required Software

Mac OS - 15.6 and higher
XCode - 16.4 and higher

Class Resources

COURSE OUTLINE

WEEKLY GRADES AND STUDENT COMMENTS

Week 8 - October 16, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It was a good lecture. As professor teaches very well, although the professor was absent, Mert did very well to fill in prof's absence. He worked really hard to ensure that we understood the material well.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
N/A

Week 7 - October 09, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
For these harder hw's I really really think releasing them thursday evening and making them due tuesday is absurd. I have other classes with hw, I work weekends, and I graduating so I'm actively job hunting. I cant afford to just stop everything to bang out an app from scratch. I personally feel like a week for something like the weather now app assignment is the minimum thats appropriate. We all have a lot of other stuff thats competing for our attention and cant be just put off.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Not related to this week only but the grading seems a bit unfair. I have double checked with Some of my classmates and a lot of them feel the same way. People are losing points for small icons or grids Not being uniform. It Feels like point deduction is being forced because students are losing points for unreasonable things. How does one lose points for File organization, or code quality. My quality is similar to what is being shown in Class. The professor needs to discuss greeting leniency with TAs. I love This class and really enjoy it, but the grading is a little frustrating because you’re losing points for things that don’t make sense.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It was interesting to know more about API and how its implemented in mobile apps. The assignment feels tough.

Week 6 - October 02, 2025

Comments from students

Not bad, didn’t present though

N/A

I really appreciated all of the feedback the professor gave us. Even though he shared his own perspectives, he took the time to listen to our reasoning and understand our thought process.

The class is interesting because the professor spent time on group presentations and provided feedback so that students could have better preparation for the next project.

I feel like we should have had a clear direction on what to present before the meeting. I think that then presentations would have moved faster and more people would have presented. It should have just been user flow, wireframe, then prototype, just like how the ending presentations went since there was no room to repeat anymore like the beginning presentations. After talking with people after class, it seemed like they also thought the same. Also, i think we should have had a way to send that we wanted to present.

Good feedback

It was good presenting in front of class because this way the Professor was able to view the project and share valuable insights on it and how we could improve upon. Good class, helping us improve.

No comment

Week 5 - September 25, 2025

Comments from students

I am not sure if I did everything right since the last HW was not graded before this exam. I hope next HWs can be graded beforehand or at least we can see the solution before the exam.

I do not recommend using Macincloud for the exam. 50% of the exam was spent waiting for the VM to complete its tasks—even as minimal as typing code or shifting windows around—which was time that could have been better utilized for completing additional exam tasks. Macincloud is counterintuitive to completing the course.

The assignment was straightforward, but MacInCloud made it very unfun.

It would have been quite difficult to do in the allotted time if it wasnt based on the homework. I liked that the better you understood the homework the easier the test was.

It was very similar to the homework so the exam wasnt difficult if one kept up with the homeworks

Overall, it was ok. There were a couple of parts that were tricky.

Week 4 - September 18, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Your microphone on teams is not the greatest quality

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The code comments describing what each line specifically does personally helped me a lot!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Great Class!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The class was good, as the professor walked us with new concepts and showed us the code working along with explanation. Thank you

Week 3 - September 11, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I feel like I'm learning too much too fast. I worry how I will perform on the exam. Maybe it's because I have another heavy load class this semester too. I feel like I just don't have the time to absorb and remember all these new coding functions. Trying to remember them all to make a functioning app for the exam with no external help will be impossible for me at this point.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It was easy to follow along, and it was nice learning about Figma

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Great Class

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Alot of new learnings. It was a good lecture.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I love swift!

Week 2 - September 4, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I think it would be helpful to allow us to be more creative when discovering how to code with swift and xcode. For example, the assignment would be described as: "Make an app that uses tab functionality and includes [certain function] on tab 1 [another function] on tab 2, and [a third function] on tab 3." for example. this lets us be creative while learning and practicing the code we need to learn.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
NA

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Everything went well. Alot more subjct matter was covered and enjoyed the class

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I wish the code for the first of the two demo apps had been posted as well. It would have been a bit simpler to be able to work with and learn from that with the actual code.

Week 1 - August 28, 2025

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It is difficult to understand you sometimes. I also disagree on your opinion as to why we should be locked into apple's bad ecosystem for this class. Android holds 72% of the global market share of mobile OS users, which has been climbing steadily. You can code for android on any OS, easily, but apple locks you into their ecosystem. The macincloud experience was terrible, laggy, and unreliable. I had to buy a mac just for this class. To join the apple ecosystem and download xcode, I had to give them all of my information excluding my SSN. This is an extreme invasion of privacy IMO, just for a class I need to finish this semester if I want to graduate on time. I feel my arm being twisted by UH on this. They should offer one class on android systems and one on ios, but to not teach the development of software on an OS held by 72% of the entire world is crazy to me. You wanted honest feedback, so hopefully you see this as constructive and not just me ranting about my displeasure in the structure of this course. Also the class should be called "Apple App Development" based on what you said we are going to be doing this semester.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The online section wasn't able to actually view the lecture live this past week.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
class flowed smoothly and for the online section it was still very understandable

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
involving the online section to ask questions would be nice.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I wish professor could speak louder so I can listen to him clearly

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I am enjoying swift, but groups should at least be a minimum of 3 people.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
No comments. Looking forward to learning more about app development in SwiftUI.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I would recommend to take more breaks during class to strengthen our attention spans.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Some of the code files were confusing to access through teams.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
As a beginner to Swift, I appreciated how Professor Pavlidis took his time to explain all the components of the demo app during class, regardless of whether the logic was simple or more complex.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It was a wonderful beginning to the class. Much better than expected. I see that the Professor have a genuine care for students and wants us to excel in life. I got to know this when I spoke to him after class where he mentioned that he wants to ensure that we are able to develop a mid level app on our own. It was a wonderful lecture and looking forward to the next one.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
N/A