May Sun Always shine on SRKNEC! Jay's Weblog

Hey.

 We finally concluded the 3-Day workshop for II year students and believe me it was amazing fun and a great hit! We are having holidays and still, we had 36 students attending the workshop for all three days. I know thats a small number, but I think that was a good start and the number will increase as the Open Source awareness spreads at SRKNEC.

Introductory talk:

 I started the day with an introductory talk. Firstly I explained why exactly we have arranged the workshop. We cant expect students to become programming genius or become a Opensolaris Pro in 3 - days! But we just wanted II years to know what things lie ahead of them. Also we wanted to introduce them to the amazing world of Open Source backed Sun Microsystems!

I explained the importance of Open Source and showed some cool videos which started the ball rolling!

I also demonstrated the Sun Academic Initiative and the Open Source University Meetup (OSUM). Students were thrilled after learning about the prospects of free training and they found the OSUM site really AWESOME!

The talk lasted 1:30 mins. from 10 - 11:30 AM.

 Brainteaser Session:

Mr Sumit Mudliar conducted the next session. He asked some amazing puzzles and brain teasing questions which really got all students active and interested. Sun goodies (pens and Keychains) were given to the correct answers!  He also explained general stages in software development which students found perfectly logical and easy to grasp.

Session ended in an hours time.

Lunch!

We had our lunch which was amazing and frankly speaking far better than what we had expected. Kudos again to Sumit for arranging amazing caterers!

Talk by Proff M.B.Chandak on current trends in IT

After lunch, Proff M.B.Chandak, HOD, CSE gave a brilliant talk which covered top 10 current trends in the IT industry. The students were completely new to all the concepts and so some of them found it difficult to grasp. But at the end of the day, the talk proved really enlightening not only for the juniors but also for us!

The topics covered included virtualization, SaaS (Software as a service), internet telephony, networking, NLP etc. The session lasted for about an hour and was an absorbing one!

After the session, we had some filler Q/A session which refreshed students for the next session!

Recap of C

Mr Vasusen Patil then conducted a interactive session where, all the basic concepts in C were brushed up! Students were asked to write basic C constructs and logical functions. They soon realized that they knew very little besides syllabus.

Then we explained them that C is far more useful language that just another subject in curriculum and can be used to make really cool programs. We stressed the fact that it is the best language when it comes to building the basic logic and concepts in programming.

Introduction to Netbeans and Cygwin

After the recap, Vasusen went on to introduce the students to Netbeans IDE. This was the first time most of them ever sae an IDE and they were simply amazed. We used Netbeans to build basic C applications using Cygwin compiler. We demonstrated the various functionality of the IDE and the support it provides for building up substantial software.

The concepts like code folding, intelligence of IDE, dynamic error detection, code generation, refactoring etc were explained and students really enjoyed the thing!

Student Kits!

We also distributed Opensolaris and Netbeans student kits!