Future Learn: Begin Programming Your First Android Game

Future Learn are running a course from the University of Reading on programming an Android game.  It's a seven week course, which they estimate will take about three hours of your time a week, and it started yesterday, so if you start now, you won't need to catch up.

Week one is mostly about downloading the android emulator, so you can program on a laptop.  Tip; unzip the ADK using 7-zip, especially if it asks you for a password.  It doesn't need a password, but the default windows unzipper can't handle files with titles that long, or something like that.  Either way, unzipping with 7-zip got rid of all my error messages.

As far as I can tell, the basic format of the course is; they give you the barebones code of the game, then show you how to modify it, thereby teaching you what each bit does.  It's all in java.  I'm mostly focused on learning Python, but you can't really help learning a bit of java along the way, whichever language you focus on.

You don't need to own an android device or have any prior knowledge of programming at all.  You do need to have some computer skills in the sense of googling error messages and hoping, or at least, that's what I've had to use so far in unzipping that damn ADK.

I'll give you more updates as I get further into it, or you can click on the link and go see for yourself.