An Experience of Teaching Mobile Cloud Computing

Our cloud computing course focuses not only on cloud data center but also mobile devices. we firstlyintroduce the concepts of cloud computing. The needs between clouds and mobile devices are differentbut compensated to each other. The clouds referred to cloud data center / platform, and mobile devicesmay be mobile phones. In the part of cloud data center, virtualization, distributed file system, Azureprogramming were introduced. In the part of mobile devices, Android programming was introduced.There would be some reading assignments, homeworks or take-home labs for students after each class.The reading assignments may be some related papers, and the take-home labs may be the installationof a virtual machine hypervisor in their own computer. Some labs are held in a computer room forpracticing technologies in the class. We prepared some external real platforms for students. The platformsare Windows Azure and hi-cloud. We obtained some trial accounts of Windows Azure from Microsoft™,and some trial accounts of hi-cloud from Chunghwa Telecom. With those accounts, students are able todeploy their programs to a real cloud platform and not only in a simulator. Beside the labs, there was afinal project for each student. One to five students were grouped as a team to finish a final project anddemonstrate their project at the end of course. Cloud computing is a wide topic to cover everything ina single course. What students learned is not only in the lecture but also learned in implementing theirproject, or reading assignments. We also learned from students’ amazing projects which are shown inthis paper selectively. This cloud computing course benefits us and students from each other.