Aug 5
<h2>TIIDELab Fellowship Experience 2.0</h2>
Communication is not what you say, but what is heard by others ~ Mr Kenny
INTRODUCTION
Hi and welcome to the second part of my TIIDELab Fellowship Experience Series. By the second part, I mean another month/6 successfully scaled. If you have not read the first part of this series, you can check it out here: TIIDELab Fellowship Experience 1.0
Now back to the article!
As with style from the first part of the series, this will be a rundown of what I have done in my second month at TIIDELab.
This article will be split into 3 sections:
- Javascript
- Ongoing Project
- Soft skills
By Ongoing Project, I am referring to the project my team (Data Pirates) and I would be building all through our stay in the program, and possibly after the conclusion as well. More details later.
JAVASCRIPT
For the first month we looked into HTML and CSS and just briefly talked about what Javascript can be used for, but this past second month we delved into Javascript proper and below is a part of our curriculum:
What is Javascript?
When we say HTML provides structure, CSS adds style and provides the layout, Javascript is a programming language that is used to add interactivity and make our websites dynamic.
We had Mr Kenny and Mr Peter provide us with guidance whenever we had questions or parts of the materials we did not understand. And, as our usual TIIDELab tradition, we had daily presentations on the materials we learned; because only when you can communicate effectively what you learn as basically as possible, can you say you have really learned.
I can not say I am a complete beginner to Javascript, but even I had a lot of new things I learned from going back to the fundamentals. I learned about binding, data types, type conversion, closure, recursion, conditional branching, functions, objects and Regular expressions and even had assignments to put it all into practice.
Here is how I went about solving them:
We also had one on a bank USSD process, but that is very long and would most likely come out when I write a separate technical article — You can look out for that😉
The best part of all this is that there is still so much to learn and we have already come this far. Oh right! before I forget, I also happened to win a prize at one of our Javascript speed tests by Mr Kenny.
The Task:
My method:
The shorter method Mr Kenny taught us:
All that in just one line…Amazing right? I can not wait to venture deeper into javascript and learn about mapping and other concepts.
PROJECT
Team name — Data Pirates
My team and I got a lot of work done regarding our project this past month — it helped us see all the different components that go into building a project and not just the coding aspect.
We prepared and presented our SRS (Software Requirement Specification) and FRD (Functional Requirement Document) and did some user surveys and UI designing.
What is our project all about?
As you have seen from the image above, CodeAsk is what we are working on. After conceptualization and having a rough idea of what we wanted to do, we had to provide our SRS and FRD documents, which are just documents holding what we want our software to do, how it will perform and its functional requirements.
From there, we moved to User research and UI (User Interface) mapping.
We had an interesting session with Miss Celeste on the reasons for carrying out product research and she mentioned how we should not start a project just jumping to the solution but carry out proper research first to determine if there are people that relate to the problem at hand and what their challenges are.
This would help build something for the people that actually need it and not something people end up not wanting, after all, you are building it for a particular target audience.
With this, we were able to construct our survey and send it out to as many people as we could (71 feedbacks in total).
Interpreting our survey result was also very interesting, we were able to get our target audience, perform a competitive analysis and even get their pain points.
Pain points are specific problems faced by current or prospective customers in the marketplace. ~ gartner.com
This helped us build a more factual and concrete Problem Statement, our value proposition and some proposed solutions
And while doing this, a portion of our team started working on the UI as well. They were able to complete some pages, create some components and our color scheme (The design system).
Do you know what is really crazy about all this??
We did all this for the first time this past month (Yes, including the UI), and we were already able to accomplish so much and learn as well. Hard to imagine what we would do over the next 4 months.
SOFT SKILLS
Well, I of course would not forget to mention our Friday meetups — Soft skills class.
Our Big brother (Mr Shamsudeen) took us through the methods of making smart decisions, such as the PrOACT (Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences, Trade-offs), we also looked at ethical considerations and potential biases.
The fun part was when we had to act out different scenarios in groups using these decision methods.
We also celebrated WYSD (World Youth Skills Day), dressed as different professions we would have been if not for tech, and made a video advocating TIVET(Technical Industrial Vocational and Entrepreneurship Training). We had two guests — Mr Molema Lema and Ms Zeenat with us that day
Ha! and very importantly, we got paired up with our mentors.
I was paired up with Ms Celeste and am looking forward to learning as much as I can from her as a mentee. I would want to use this channel once more to thank all mentors for their time and good intentions to share that with us
CONCLUSION
And that brings us to the end of this month’s rundown with 2/6 parts of the series now complete.
Special thanks to the TIIDELab Founder, Council of elders, Tech support, NECA, ITF, Big brother, Our Mentors, Teachers, and of course TIIDELab for this opportunity.
Stay tuned for what the remaining 4 months hold. 👋🏽👋🏽👋🏽
You can reach me or keep track of what I do on:
