My Summer ’17 Programming school Experience
Program was organised by Covenant University (The 2nd Programming School Course for CMIS Department)
“Programming school will be a six weeks intensive programming course for the 100 level and 200 level students of the CMIS Department”
Every time the thought of programming school came into my head since the day it was announced , I did not know whether to be annoyed or be happy. Annoyed at the fact that it would just be a repeat of the classes we had during the semester or happy at the fact that we would finally devote some special time to programming and nothing else. But I decided not to judge the whole outcome of the event before it even occurred.
The Beginning…….
On the the 22nd of May, 2017, students started arriving in school. Although I had been around since the last semester ended about two weeks ago. We had a meeting the next day where all the rules where laid down to us.We were given two languages to choose from, Java and Python. I picked Java.We were going to have classes from 9 am to 1 pm and tutorials from 3 pm to 5 pm everyday.Classes started the next day after that.
At first after the first few days, I thought my worst fears were getting realized. The classes seemed normal and kinda boring, people were disinterested …… it was all just going to be the same story …… or so I thought.
So we got what we wanted……..
After two weeks we were given a task in class … we had to build a PC platform app for ordering of burgers. At first it seemed easy , but actually turned out kind of tricky but also fun. A bookstore application followed after that as an assignment. Two weeks after we learned about web development in java that is using Java Server Pages. The Python guys learned about Django , but that was much later that us, probably about a week later. We were also told to build two websites based on JSP knowledge. I was only able to complete one fully. The other ….. let’s not talk about it . Many people struggled with the web development because they had no prior knowledge in web and in the classes we just had like a crash course in html and css, but they survived.
The big surprise………
Two weeks to the end of programming school, we were told that there was going to be a competition. 14 groups, and the task was to come up with web and desktop platform applications that could help a company called Sarperstein sell laptops and tablets. We were also going to use a sorting algorithm called the Heterogeneous Euclidean-Overlap Metric (HEOM). When we asked about winnings, we were told nothing. Each group carried on with their work almost immediately as we each expected the best.
The Happy ending ……..
On the day of presentation , everyone was well dressed, and seemed ready to dazzle everyone else. Every single team had amazing presentations and wonderful websites and applications to show of to the judges. It was pretty amazing.
At the end , the top four teams were awarded(there was a joint third place) with cash prices. My team was first.The cash prices were kind of shocking as we did not expect them.
Right now I still wish it wasn’t over as it turned out far better than I expected. I really learnt a lot during the time. It was way better than normal school session.
