About 2021 DES & DEV Bootcamp

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gdscaefunai

9 min readFeb 3, 2022

In February and March, we had successfully hosted meetups and workshops for the 2021 Solution Challenge in our GDSC. April just began and we needed technical events for the month.

Precious Ngwube, a member of our core team, came up with the idea of a 4-week Javascript series. On planning in a core team meeting, we sought out to 6 weeks instead. The first four weeks were for learning, while the last two were for community building.

Emmanuel Chukwuemeka (Officialemeka) was the lead for design in our GDSC. He suggested the addition of UI/UX design as a learning track to the program. We then named the event: DES & DEV Bootcamp (… DESign and DEVeloper).

At that time, I doubled as both GDSC lead and Genesys Campus Club lead in AE-FUNAI. As a result, I organized the series in honor of these two brands (GDSC and Genesys). Hence, promotions of the event included logos of both GDSC and Genesys.

Planning

We had meetups every Saturday during the six weeks of the Bootcamp. The first four weeks entailed intensive learning. During this time, participants completed small projects individually. They submitted their projects by each meetup. In the last two weeks, participants built projects in teams, which they showcased on the demo day.

Planning and promotions took us three weeks, making the Bootcamp start by the third Saturday of April. We first chose Convocation Arena as the event venue. Victor Amaechi, Ephraim Leo, and I designed the flyers we used for promotions across the Bootcamp. Jennifer Mbuton, Emere Michael, and Victor alternated the job of moderator during each Saturday.

Michael and Victor took care of promoting the Bootcamp. They broadcasted the event online and offline. All promotions included a central call-to-action: the event registration form at https://bit.ly/desdev21 (it’s, of course, closed by now). I stopped the form from collecting responses by the third week of learning. We recorded 252 responses at this closure. Unarguably, Michael and Victor’s efforts reaped great fruits.

Officialemeka was in charge of the design track. He curated content and defined deliverables of participants in design. Specifically, he created an notion.so board to guide the learning of design participants. Obinna Ukoha (Obisco) was also a design mentor. He, together with Officialemeka, helped designers during unblocking sessions on the Saturday meetups.

Emmanuel Uchenna (Eunit) was in charge of the web developer track. Ihechikara, Joshua Akachi, and I were the other web development mentors. We assisted web development learners during the Bootcamp. They carried out and submitted tasks assigned by Eunit each week.

As students, we couldn’t meet with learners every day. We gave participants resources, to learn from during the week. We assisted them with learning in Whatsapp groups and on Saturday meetups. Each Saturday meetup had its separate agenda. Most of the time, it involved unblocking sessions, solving difficulties in participants’ learning journey. The following are what happened during each meetup.

Intro Meetup — Sat. 17th April 2021

Check out the pictures of the event at https://gdsc.community.dev/e/mc6aun/

The day’s program involved an introductory session and then a parallel session. I was on stage during the first session. Initially, I described what communities programs were and spoke on GDSC and Genesys. I then explained the Bootcamp’s structure, what we expected of the participants, and what the participants expected from us. You can check out the following slide.

We separated the audience in two. On the right were web development participants, while on the left were UI/UX design participants. Eunit and Officialemeka addressed each group, respectively. They introduced the objectives and demands of each learning track. They, together with other mentors, assisted the participants in setting up their development environment (for developers), and Figma accounts for UI/UX designers.

Emmanuel Chukwu (Officialemeka) mentoring UI/UX design participants during the parallel session

We were surprised by the number of attendees. We had up to 80 people in attendance. This Bootcamp was the first in-person/physical event we publicized this much. Our promoters did their job well (Thanks to Michael and Micode). Asides from their presence, the commitment of these was also mind-blowing. They promptly followed up with the event. Those who didn’t have laptops paired up with those who had. We were impressed.

We had some challenges with the projector and with power. The person who delivered the projector to us forgot to bring the power cable of the projector. Consequently, we couldn’t project the slides during the event. Concerning electricity, I thank Festus Ali, Onyinyechi Gilbert, and NFCS for providing us with generators. As of the Bootcamp, the school had not yet powered Convocation Arena, so these generators helped us. We provided fuel for them.

Google Forms was also part of the “challenges” story. We created a Google Form for collecting submissions of individual projects across the weeks. However, Google Forms kept on blocking the form, that the form violated their policies. The fields in the form were: name, email address, phone number, learning track, and submission link. We didn’t know which policy we violated.

This blocking forced me to create a custom submission form. We used it to collect participants’ submissions across the Bootcamp. I built the frontend of the form with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript (without any helper libraries or frameworks). I then made the form to submit to a Google Sheet we had set for that purpose. That way, we could monitor submissions.

At the end of the intro meetup, we took a group picture. The participants went home, and we expected to submit what they had built before the weekend. UI/UX design participants had to replicate the Google Search page. Web development participants were to develop a simple portfolio for themselves.

Week 1 — Sat. 24th April 2021

Check out the pictures of the event at https://gdsc.community.dev/e/mwc8k8/

The day’s program had only one activity: grouped learning. Learners clustered around mentors and followed along on how to carry out the task they were to submit. We had new members. Some persons from the previous week didn’t attend. The meetup was still at Convocation Arena. Festus and Gilbert still helped us with generators. We didn’t bother getting a projector, and we didn’t get any again till the demo day.

Feedback from learners made us understand that clustered learning was helpful. Participants explained that the grouped learning provided some personalized experience, given the community. We took pictures, posted them on social media, and rewarded those with the highest tweets. By the next week, UI/UX designers were to submit the landing of a restaurant app, while web developers were to submit a countdown timer built with JavaScript.

Managing the Bootcamp was demanding to the core team members and me. I got more persons into the core team to help various sectors. We had a core team meeting on Monday evening after week 1. There, we discussed and made plans towards [demo day](get-the-link). We also set the day’s program for week 2’s meetup. I motivated everyone to keep volunteering as balancing academics and sacrificing for the Bootcamp wasn’t easy on both mentors and other non-technical core team members.

We changed the venue of the meetups to [Faculty of Humanities](get-the-link). Wait why? Well, because of electricity; so that we won’t spend on fuel any longer. After all, other organizations in school had started using Convocation Arena on Saturdays for their events, so we meuved.

Week 2 — Sat. 1st May 2021

Check out the pictures of the event at https://gdsc.community.dev/e/m6xbzq/

This Saturday was a little different. Eunit spoke on “Documenting one’s tech journey”, and got participants to write their stories on Medium. Below are some stories from Community members, please read them:

Collins Anudu guided the audience on registering for GitHub Student Developer Pack. Jason Anosike guided the audience on registering for the Google Africa Developer Scholarship. We equally continued the day with unblocking sessions and clustering mentors and learners together.

We modified the submission form to collect everyone’s Medium story. We stopped submissions as participants were not following up on the homework pattern we had designed. We took community pictures and ended the meetup.

Week 3 — Sat. 8th May 2021

Check out the pictures of the event at https://gdsc.community.dev/e/mpk3hr/

We continued week 3’s meetup in one of the halls in the Faculty of Humanities building. We had just one agenda for the day: clustered learning/unblocking sessions. Participants by this time had made many friends in the community. Those to meddle/learn with were no longer an issue. People learned more stuff. We had new participants who joined the program given that their friends had invited them, and they’ve been hearing about DES & DEV on campus.

I want to especially appreciate our mentors at this point. They technically were so involved in helping the learners that they didn’t have time for themselves. This is because participants met the mentors at other times during the week, not just on Saturday meetups. It’s not easy to volunteer! Thank you mentors of DES & DEV.

Week 4 — Sat. 15th May 2021

Check out the pictures of the event at https://gdsc.community.dev/e/mpxpeu/

The 4th Saturday of learning had come. I started feeling a little fulfilled that the Bootcamp had been up for a month and activities were progressing in peace. No violence. No casualties. Well, such peace was till the Bootcamp ended. Thank God.

We had reduced attendees this Saturday. Churches that use the halls in Humanities Faculty disturbed our meetup as they had some programs that day. Consequently, we held our meetup for only half as much of the time we normally have our event.

We were entering the two weeks of community building. We attempted grouping participants into teams of Design and Web Developers. The grouping had flaws because some members were absent. We called for unscheduled meetings during the week to get participants ready for demo day.

Unscheduled Meetings & Demo Day Rehearsals

On the next two Saturdays, 22nd and 29th May, we (community members) met. But this time, our meetings were not publicized and we were focused on what each team was to build and how they were to demo on the demo day.

We reviewed the teaming, remixed participants, and analyzed the products been built. Teams prepared and rehearsed their presentations. We aided/motivated participants and took more pictures.

We had more time (an extra week) for the community projects because we postponed the demo day. We postponed the demo day to Saturday 5th June (instead of 29th May) as a result of Biafran insecurities in the South East (of Nigeria) — interstate movements were not permitted. It gave us more time to rehearse and plan better for the demo day in all ramifications.

Bootcamp DEMO Day 🥺😎🥳🎉🎉

There was food and drinks.
Jerry Uke spoke on “Community Advocacy”.
We had a mini-hackathon.
Demoed 6 community projects.
Awarded prizes.
There was food and drinks.
…

Demo Day is worth its own story.

From when I became GDSC Lead, I had always wanted to organize a demo day. I believe that showcasing what we build helps in maintaining the community spirit. Seeing a demo day come to life gave me some unforgettable joys 🙈.

I was happy on Demo Day because, in totality, we had achieved more community members in our school, created more awareness for tech, and had organized a great event. I was overjoyed because the Bootcamp had finally come to an end (couldn’t wait for this) as I could now rest from weekly consecutive meetups.

Up Next: Demo Day

Please read about the Bootcamp DEMO Day at the following: