Gadgetory

okay so there are some scenarios where learning-by-doing isn't such a good idea abseiling lion-taming flying a plane these are scenarios where it's better to really know your theory before you jump in but in coding or development getting started on projects is often the best way to really understand all that fear me to sit in context and how it all works that's what makes all the difference so whilst it's a good idea to do some background reading as soon as possible you should start trying to put that theory into practice and come up with some kind of beginner project and I think a great beginner project is to create some kind of quiz because a quiz is a simple project that you can make easily it's something rewarding you can play on your own or with friends and something you can change and develop and turn into all kinds of other things in this video I'm going to show you how to make a Star Wars quiz because everyone's in a stall with mood right now but you could easily turn this into any other kind of quiz or you could turn it into some kind of brain training program or a maths game or an app that shows you information so follow along and hopefully you'll learn something hopefully you'll enjoy the project and read the accompanying article to get a better understanding of what everything does so this project is aimed at beginners yes but beginners with a little bit of background understanding regarding Java regarding XML and Android if you have no prior experience you can still play along but I highly recommend you do some reading in order to understand some of the things that I'm going to skim over I will explain a bit but for a much better understanding follow the link in the description or just do your own background reading the whole thing is going to take seven minutes because that's what I do and if you get stuck of course just use the force okay so in most new apps you're going to have an activity and activity being a page or a screen in your app and this will be made up of a Java file in this case mainactivity.java and a layout file in this case activity underscore main dot XML and the great thing is that if we use the design view by making sure you're on the design tab down the bottom here that's the text tab then you can simply drag and drop the different elements you want to onto the screen and if you select a view then on the right here you can change the attributes in the attribute window you can also change the name of a view by changing the ID and this will allow us to refer to it later we're going to call this one question now if you want to add another textview we simply drag and drop from here like so and we're actually going to have four more so we're going to name these answer one answer two and answer three always a good idea and that will be called outcome that bottom one you need to anchor all four sides to either the edge of the display or another view that's anchored and that's nice and easy we are going to add one more thing though and that's an on click for these so we want to click view all attributes in our attribute window here and we'll call this on answer one click what this is going to do is allow us to refer to what happens when someone clicks on this in our code can you guess what this one on the called on answer to click and on answer three click okay so there's lots of different ways we could approach making a quiz but I think we should use a map and seeing as I'm kind of in charge that's probably what we're gonna be doing so okay so with that in mind we need to create our map and we do that like say so we're saying a map with two strings that's the key in the value we're gonna call our map questions I'm gonna say new hash map string string brackets now you'll notice these are red if you find things red like this just click on them and press alt + enter that imports a new class I won't go into what that means okay next we're going to create a new integer which is a whole number I'm gonna call that question no and as you can probably guess that's going to refer to which question we're on and the next thing we need to do is create our views text view outcome text view question text view answer 1 ok next we need to tell our code that those views are the ones who defined earlier in the XML and do that by saying find view by ID our meaning resource answer one remember we used capitals there let me can do the same thing for answer two and answer three I'm also gonna want to do the same thing for the question we're gonna want to do the same thing for our out to come okay now we're going to need to populate our map that means putting in our questions and answers and we do that by saying questions remember that's what we called the map put and then we can say question one that's the key and then the value might be what is kylo ren's real name there so I made earlier you can steal mine from the article on the site or writing your own notice that I've got write one wrong a one wrong b1 so we're using this number and we need to be consistent with the naming conventions here and you're gonna see why in a moment okay so now we're going to create a new method set question so that's read for now because that's not actually a normal command I'm going to say private void which means that it's a method that doesn't need to be accessed by other parts of the program so to assign those questions and answers to our views we go like so question set text which is a way of changing the text questions get so questions remember is our map and then we need to use our key to retrieve that we're going to get that with question and then plus question now so that's going to change as the question goes up and then we need to do the same thing of course for the answers I'm gonna do one more thing here as well and that's to set a tag for answer one and that's going to be correct okay the next thing I want to do is to create another method this won't be a public method because we're using it from outside this script and it's called on answer one click and it has view V there as well and here we're just going to say if answer one get tagged is equal to correct then we execute this bit of script which is to say on our outcome set text well done and then we're going to reset our questions but only after we've iterated the question number so now it's moved on to question two or three and then we're going to say accept question again otherwise else outcome set text try again to our view which just means whichever view happens to have been clicked and the reason for that is because it makes it much easier for us just copy and paste this and put in our announcer to click and on answer three click again there are quicker and better ways of doing this we could for instance have a global on click and then look for that tag and that's really the reason to be doing that however I'm keeping things simple here just so you can follow along and this is the easiest way to do it okay so all that's really left to do now is to change the order so that it's not always the same and for that we're going to need a random number you'll need to import that class by the way and we get that by writing this dot next int three there we go and then we can say if the value one equals zero so that's going to have a value of zero to two because it starts at zero three options starting at zero in quantal equals there okay and then we can say else if the value 1 equals 1 then we put our correct answer and our tag in the second position and else if the value 1 equals 2 then the correct answer and tag go in the third position it doesn't really matter where the wrong answers are and there you go and of course again there are better ways of doing this what I would actually do is enter that data into a list and then shuffle the list using a good random algorithm but again for simplicity sake this will work just fine and there you have a complete working quiz in just seven minutes today it Reds at the bottom now well done and you hope there's more to do obviously at the moment we'll crash when you get to the end of the list so you need to do something about that and of course we want to make it look nicer and you'll do that in the XML and you can change the background and I set a Star Wars logo at the top you can do that by just using an image view for instance and you can mess around with your colors by going to the values and go to the colors XML change the scheme mess around with it as you like well that's the basic bones the bare bones of your quiz and of course it can change the questions and the topic to be anything you like but if you make a horticultural quiz that you can probably assume you're going to have fewer people wanting to play so you found this video useful interesting guys if you did then please leave a like please share it around and let me know in the comments what you thought if it gets stuck or if you have any requests for future videos of 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