Loading...Every summer most people have two things on their minds – holidays & relaxation. Meanwhile, in every office, we can’t stop buzzing about education & Pentalog Events!
In the past 5 years we’ve managed to build an unbroken tradition of hosting educational activities with secondary school pupils, high schoolers and university students. All activities have their own agenda, mentors, and challenges. Check out what we were up to this year!
Estival Experience: IT after-school or how to get started in tech
For the first time in the history of the Estival Experience we’ve had to organize three sessions due to the high interest and high number of participants. We welcomed nearly 60 high schoolers who over the course of two weeks went from “hell-o” to “dem-o”.
The program focuses on sharing a broad understanding of the IT industry’s inner workings and teaching participants orientation in the domain. They study elementary programing through implementing challenging projects on subjects of their choice. All their work is organized in an Agile manner through the Scrum project management framework, so that they have a chance to work just like real programmers.
A lot of students come from high-schools where they study programming but that’s not always the case, and this year we even had a couple of guests from the local Arts school – Hans Mattis.
Most schools around the city are familiar with Estival Experience so they prepare the sign-up for the event before the end of the school year. We try to accommodate as many children as possible which is a bit of a challenge because we’re not just doing lectures, we’re doing practical activities. And even though we are passionate about education, our mentors still deserve to get a tan, don’t they?
So far, we’ve had two sessions:
- June: with kids from the prestigious Andrei Șaguna College and Grigore Moisil National Informatics College;
- August: with some of the most enthusiastic and creative bunch of students we have hosted up at the 9th floor, coming from the Emil Racoviță College and the Hans Mattis – Teutsch Vocational Highschool of Fine Arts.
In the near future, for the first time in the history of Pentalog events we will be hosting a third event during a single summer with students from the Dr. Ioan Meșotă College.
What are we going to do during these 2 weeks? Whatever the students want of course… as long as it’s in the shape of a project and it is something they are passionate about.
We teach kids about the IT industry, about the Agile mindset, the Scrum Framework through short and simple lectures accompanied by workshops and games. Then over the course of roughly 7-8 days, they learn about OOP, using Git repositories and, with the help of a designated mentor per groups of 4, they work together using what they learn to program their way to an MVP product which they will have to present to the rest of the group on the last day, just before sharing a pizza, cola, and selfies with the view from our wonderful 9th floor terrace at Pentalog Brasov.
This summer we’ve seen a wide range of projects such as pizza delivery apps, rock-band presentation websites with built-in e-shops, mobile applications, test automation and even in-browser games built solely with JavaScript. Oh, and yes! The technologies vary as they are not the primary focus of this program, enthusiasm is. There’s time for high school students to learn all the technologies, but you can’t kick-start a career in something you’re not passionate about, can you?
Summer Practice: Prepare Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow
Most high school students could do with a little persuasion and a buildup of enthusiasm to start them on learning about how cool working in the IT industry is, but students in Mathematics and Informatics at Transylvania University already know how awesome it is.
So, the goal is to teach them something they can apply and lean on, to fill in the gaps in knowledge between national curriculums and real-life job market needs.
This summer we’ve hosted 15 passionate students who, with assistance of our 4 skilled mentors, developed a flight booking system from scratch using Java, Sprint, Hibernate and a microservices architecture.
It’s not easy to learn and do so much in such a short period of time – 6 hours a day for 3 weeks – thus a selection process was set up on our side to find the best-prepared students. The 15 participants scored the highest in 3 tests – Java, OOP, and English (because if you don’t know something you should at least know how to google it in English ? ).
The feedback we received at the end of the program is the feedback we actually receive at every iteration of the Summer Practice and is the essence of why we do it. All students appreciate the practical nature of using programming knowledge to solve real-life relatable problems in contrast to acquiring a plethora of unrelatable theoretical concepts.
Pentalog Events: What’s next?
A one-week holiday of course! To get that tan on before we kick off the 3rd edition of Estival Experience and the 2nd edition of the Summer Practice.
But education doesn’t stop until next summer. No way we could stop on what has already been done! There are too many people passionate about teaching in Pentalog, and way…way too many people who are eager to learn!
Therefore, we’re looking forward to as many sign-ups to our upcoming Pentastagiu program as to our previous Pentalog Events, where mentors will be holding a series of webinar-based courses on cool technologies such as Java, .Net, React.Js, as well as Quality Assurance and Soft Skills!
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