My Summer ‘17 programming school Experience

by Dara Assim-Ita

“Create an e-commerce platform for users to buy devices”, our Dean of Students, Mr. Ezenwoke Azubuike said.

Who am I kidding? That’s not what he said.

This is what he said.

Mr. Azu, as he is fondly called, read the entire question as we all looked in awe before actually explaining what he meant.

If he planned on scaring us, he did a perfect job.

6 weeks before this terrifying “family meeting”, we had to pick a programming language that we wanted to learn within a 5 week period.

We had two choices:

Python or Java

I picked Java because I had previously learnt Python to a reasonable extent and I was going to do Java the next semester.

Seeing that more people enrolled for Java, we were divided into four groups while the Python guys were divided into three groups.

Each group had 4 instructors at their disposal. 2 instructors led the morning session while the other 2, the afternoon tutorial session.

The morning sessions were in depth discussions on certain topics following a very detailed teaching manual provided to every student. While the afternoon sessions were critical hands on sessions based on practical and real life scenarios.

Occasionally, we were told to implement a full desktop and a full web application over the weekend which was in turn graded by our instructors. This ensured that students participated in every lecture that was being taught.

For Java, we were introduced to:

• basic Java development for the first 2 weeks,
• desktop development the 3rd week,
• web development for a week and a half and finally,
• basic Android development in the 6th week before our competition.

Python students however, focused on:

• Python development and
• desktop development for about 4 weeks and 3 days and
• DJANGO within the last two days before the competition was said to begin.

For the competition, we were divided into 14 groups.

The last week of the competition was intense. Students who never seemed to show interest worked tirelessly with their group members to gain the first position and a cash prize.

We had to create both desktop and wed applications for our projects and we were judged based on

• aesthetics,
• content and
• development.

Each team was reviewed by four external lecturers each giving their own grades based on a marking scheme. After facing that, each team had to market their product to the judges who sat as the board of regents of the company we created the projects for- Saperstein.

The winning group during the presentation onstage.

After the awards were presented.

Finally,

Let the holidays begin!