In this episode of #Talking​ #Kotlin​, we talk to Rahul Pandey, Android engineer from Facebook and lecturer at Stanford, about his approach of teaching Kotlin for Android development.

The classes he teaches usually consist of an interesting mix of undergraduate students who have just completed an introductory programming course taught usually in Python or C++ and graduates who have finished their studies, work in the industry for a couple of years, and come back to Stanford to do a master's degree.

Students find Kotlin easier to study because it has similarities with Python and Java and takes the best parts of both languages, where there is a lot of safety of types not provided by Python but at the same time there is a lot of expressiveness that can’t be achieved with Java. The familiarity with the other languages is why students are able to quickly get comfortable with the language.

To teach Kotlin Rahul uses the Flipped Classroom principle. The idea is that when in class students interact with each other and the teacher to try to work out a solution for a particular problem, but while at home they watch tutorials and video walkthroughs. He also uses pair programming to make students work on the same problem at the same time and get a feeling of how Kotlin developers create applications in real life.

Find Rahul Pandey online: YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/rpandey1234​ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpandey1234/​ Twitter - https://twitter.com/rpandey1234​

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