New course by JKUAT Endeavour graduates

Following the success of the first JKUAT Endeavor program which involved a course in mobile application development in Java some IT under students under the umbrella of Jkuat Linux Users Group (JLUG) teamed up and approached some students of the first endeavor program. The students approached were Omondi Ochieng, Kirui Kennedy and Masai Abel. Their request was that they too needed to learn the same as they had missed out in the first endeavor program. The class is made up of around 20 students all from the IT department.

The course is to last for six weeks, one session every Saturday. The first lesson under this program kicked off on 20^th February this year. The course introduction was done by Kirui. It covered the various aspects of mobile telephony, its associated technologies and the available market for mobile applications. The course curriculum was also discussed and the goals to be achieved were laid down. The first lab was then given to the students in order to gauge their programming capabilities. Since the available time is limited the students were divided into groups and advised to start thinking of possible projects as early as possible.

JKUAT Career Talk [12 Feb 2010]

When I grow up, I want to be…’ this is the cliché phrase that recursively finds its way into every person’s conversation at one point or another in life. It defines passion, spells out purpose and serves as the foundation upon which our dreams are made concrete; at least in part. Almost always, at the end of everyone’s ‘I-want-to-be’ statement, the desired result is the same. Success. Comfort. Happiness. Luxury. Convenience.

None of this comes easy, though. This truth was clearly spelt out at the Career Talk Forum 2010 held on the 17th of February at the NSC Lecture Theatre 1. The afternoon event recorded first-rate attendance and confirmed that in issues of success, age is just but a number.  The facilitator, Catherine Kamau Wainaina, is a well known part-time lecturer at JKUAT Main Campus and Thika Technical College. She also lectures at the Mt. Kenya University and is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in Human Resource. She is very well versed with academic matters and didn’t hold back in sharing what she knows.

‘A career,’ she said, ‘is an occupation that offers one progress through life. It is a path, procedure, passage….a vocation to course. We all need to have dreams if we are to get anywhere’. She went on to state that some qualifications stand out, academic background not withstanding. These include etiquette, people skills, passion, which pushes us to keep working at something until it bears fruit, etc.

Web Application Development Course: Day 7 & 8.

We checked on what the students had done on the previous lab which was to design a simple JavaScript Calculator Application. Andrew showed the students concepts on jQuery and took them through the various selector functions. Then, they were taken through the  jQuery Lightbox and a simple jQuery powered image slideshow. The students were given a demo site incorporating the above jQuery plugins and concepts to experiment on.

Then they were introduced to PHP – variables, arrays, associative arrays and multi-dimensional arrays. The students were further taken through strings, control structures, date and time functions in PHP with sample codes to compliment the lectures. They were given a lab to create a PHP script that displays greeting message based on the time of the day.

Web Application Development Course: Week 2

The week began well, despite it being a monday and on the 15th of February.  We arrived in the lab for the lecture on JavaScript. Andrew took the students through HTML Forms, form elements and JavaScript – variables, retrieving values from a form. Students were given a lab to design a simple calculator based on JavaScript. The class size was 83. We were joined by students from the IT department.

Web Application Development Course: Day 4 & 5.

Day four lecture was on HTML and CSS Part II. Students were taken through styling for the header menu, side menus and footer menus of a web page.

Day five lecture was on photo editing for the web. Students were taken through various ways of editing a photo to achieve desired effects – shadow effect, changing a coloured photo into black/white, modifying sections of a photo.

Web Application Development Course: Day 3.

Todays lecture was on CSS rules. Students were taken through the syntax for CSS rules, applying comments to CSS and the golden rules for CSS. The lecture lasted less than an hour as the instructors had a meeting to attend. The students were given a Lab to work on: – designing a simple web page. The class size was 70.

Lab work being explained to students

Web Application Development Course: Day 2.

Todays lecture was on web design techniques using HTML. Students were taken through HTML tags, HTML page, HTML vs XHTML, Layout of a web page and CSS. Andrew how HTML and CSS are used together to achieve dynamism of a web interface. Later the students were taken through video tutorials on photo editing for the web. The class size was 65.

Students in the lab

Web Application Development Course: Week 1 Kicks Off!

The day started on well despite it being a Monday .  We, the instructors met  in the morning to plan for the week. We compiled the introductory lecture.

We went to the lab at 8:50am ready for the 9:00am class. We were impressed to get around 4 students in the lab waiting for the lecture. We started by asking the ones present to call their collegues and in a span of 10 minutes we had 32 students and the first lecture started at 9.45am. We introduced the course and Andrew Kinai took the students through tips and tools(Aptana, Adobe Browser Lab, Colour Lovers) that would make the course more interesting and successful.

Web Application Development Course

Web Application Development Course is the second course under the JKUAT Endeavor Programme. It’s main goal is to teach students how to develop real-world web applications.

Course Overview

• Introduction
• Tools & Tips
• Freelancing
• CSS/XHTML
• Photo editing for the web
• PHP/MySQL