With Christmas just a few days away we're going festive this month and will be creating an Android app that lets us track Santa as he flies across the world delivering presents to good girls and boys who test their code.

As a group, we will start with an empty Android project, include Kotlin support, add in Google Maps, and then talk to a Firebase database to track Santa throughout the evening.

Previous experience building Android apps is not required to participate: this is an opportunity to learn how to get started building Android apps. This will be a code lab style event so you should be prepared to have fun coding, not be surprised if we run into a few bugs, and should encourage you to work together with the people sitting near you.

We do ask that you please bring your own laptop with Android Studio 3.0 (latest version) installed, downloads finished, and at least one project created and run on a device or emulator. You can follow along with this video to get things going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98hXV9GmzY

(and yes, we're aware that zombies are not especially festive this time of the year). If you run into problems getting things installed and setup, post a note in the comments so we can try to help you out before the event. This will help us ensure everyone has a great time and we are able to finish building the app on time. Food and drink will be provided.