Yesterday on April 24th 2009, I organized a seminar on "Java Technologies" at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. The event was a big success and almost 50 students of different nationalities attended the seminar. This was the second Sun seminar at Hokkaido University linked to the Sun campus ambassador program.We distribute questionnaires during every seminar. In the last seminar many students shown interest in Java technologies and uses of Java in their field of research. Therefore, I decided to have this seminar on Java technologies and other uses of Java in different areas.
Although everything went on fine yesterday but organizing of the seminar was not an easy task. I started almost 20 days ago with printing and distributing the pamphlets/posters in the university. I put the poster on more than 50 notice boards of our university. For the presentation I found a lot of interesting material on the sun campus ambassador's website. I would like to thank the authors of those presentations. Also many people from Sun office Tokyo also helped me with organizing the seminar. I would like to say special thanks to Akimoto san, Yamaguchi san, Akashi san and Matsuzuka san for their invaluable help and support.
We started the reception at 1645. We gave a set of SAI pamphlet, questionnaires, and Duke key chains to each participant. In order to make the things easier for the participants we had the questionnaires in both English and Japanese languages. The seminar started at 1705. I gave almost 1 hour presentation on Java. The main agenda of the presentation was the history of Java, some basics, difference of Java from other programming languages, Java virtual machine, different flavors of Java, uses of Java and most important of all "why use Java". The presentation contained numerous examples to show the ease of use and the abstraction provided by Java API's. After that I requested Yuiko Matsuzuka san (Japan CA coordinator) to introduce SAI and OSUM community. The presentation finished at around 1820. We still had some time before the delivery of the Pizzas. So we took the oppertunity to introduce the topic of our next seminar SunSPOT. I had SunSPOT kit with the AirText demo. I introduced SunSPOT briefly and showed the demo. Many students were interested in SunSPOT after looking at the simple demo. I also gave a preliminary date for next seminar (12th of June). After this Yamaguchi san (Sun Employee) showed another demo using SunSPOT on a remote control car. It was very fascinating for the students related to robotics and mechatronics. They had never heard about people using Java for this kind of stuff. So I would say that SunSPOT was a big hit and I really hope that many people will attend our next seminar.
We had different kinds of giveaways for all the participants. Some of the giveaways were meant for the participants who ask questions or answers any question during the presentation. We had T-shirts and bags for all the participants who filled and returned the questionnaire. After than the Pizza arrived at around 18:30. It was just great and students simply loved it. They stayed in the room for a long time discussing different Java related things with me and other Sun employees that we had for the seminar. Finally at 20:00 we were free and we left the room after arranging everything.
From the questionnaires we distributed before the seminar, I can safely say that more than 95% of the students were satisfied with the seminar. I went through all the comments and suggestions by the participants and I will try my level best to improve the seminars in future. Many students are interested to learn more about Java and Sun technologies. We got email addresses of almost all the students and we will send them invitation to join the univesities OSUM community. We are looking forward to increase to OSUM community to at least 100 by the end of June 2009.
I would like to thanks everyone once again who helped me with this seminar either directly or indirectly. Given below are some memories from the seminar.
