Getting started with Design and Code — ICA PTI
12 noon — For every other person going about the premises of the Petroleum Training Institute campus at Effurun, Nigeria, it was just a normal time of the day. But for some over 40 registered students, 12pm was the starting time for not just the coding/design meetup hosted by Ingressive P.T.I, but the launching of the first and only organized community for tech and entrepreneurship in the institute — the Ingressive campus Ambassador program PTI.
‘Have you had any prior experience with coding before?”, Tombra, one of the early attendees asked Stephen, trying to network while awaiting for the event to commence. Tombra’s facial expression was the same as most of the students who came to the event — excited and hoping to learn something new, but not knowing what exactly to expect because events like this were rare on campus. He came by 11:30 am to make sure he doesn’t miss anything.
The students went out and queued up to confirm their registration, something some of them were not used to, and by 1 pm when the event started proper, attendance had peaked to 15 persons despite the troubling rain.
Paul Princewill, 3 years experienced software engineer and UI/UX designer, anchored the event. He started the opening talk with a ‘magic trick’. He had to calm the uproar when the excited crowd could not come to terms with how on earth he might have been able to pick the exact box they picked out of 9 boxes, even though he was not in the room when they picked it. The conclusion? “This feeling you are getting right now, of not knowing how on earth someone might have pulled off a magic trick, is the same feeling we all get when we first think about technology, coding, and different platforms built. Eventually, when you find out how and it is explained to you, the impossible becomes possible”. Paul Princewill explained and goes further explaining how the magic trick works and says, “this feeling of ‘oooh, so this is how it works, is the same feeling you get when you venture into coding, starting with the training you will get in this meetup”.
“But first, how do you come up with an idea that you want to code?”, this
the question started the first 10 minutes section which explored different simple problems that gave birth to big solutions. “Every day, we encounter different problems around us, on our way to the bus, on our way here, on our way home, even when we eat, we just have to learn how to jot down those problems and learn how to build solutions for them” — quoted from his talk.
Timothy Ovie, SS and SW regional ambassador for the ICA community Nigeria, came on stage to talk about the Ingressive Campus community. He mentioned how it can bring access to opportunities for students to learn how to build products, technologies, manage them as entrepreneurs and even apply for funding. “Tech communities starting with Ingressive, present different opportunities which every student should know about. All you have to do is find these communities and tap into it as a student” — He says.
What follows was an inspirational video “Anyone can code”, featuring popular entrepreneur like; Bill gates and Mark.
And then the real deal came — one can only imagine the excitement on their face after they went through the next section that took them through 1 hour of coding with HTML and was able to come out with a simple dummy homepage for a fashion brand — with headings to describe the contact, a link to Instagram page and a “call me” button. “This seems too easy to be true, you mean all I need to make a button is to use the keyword ‘button’ and just some simple structure?” — if faces could talk, that would be what the expressions of some students would say.
And then came the break. Amidst the different networking, the students were delighted when refreshment came in. One of the students exclaimed “are you sure this event is free? So you guys would teach us something this valuable, show us different opportunities and also even give refreshment just like that?”.
The program continued with Paul Princewill telling the students which programming languages to learn and where to find the resources to learn them.
And then came the design section. “Today, I am going to talk about frustration”, Paul Princewill, who also handled this section, started his talk on various examples of bad designs that have frustrated people. And then concluded with “a good design is about helping the user get to his end goal smoothly”, and we can achieve that starting with 3 principles among many — adding space, creating clarity and reducing the number of steps” and went on to further explain how it can be applied and different links to find resources/inspiration.
The program concluded with a story, and then “do not forget all that you have learned speech”. It couldn’t have ended any better, except that we wished every registered person was present.
Thanks to the Ingressive campus ambassadors program. Special thanks to the students, lectures and management of PTI, and also thank you, yes you, for reading this far.
