Good day, dear Habravites.
Today there will be a story about the international student school JASS that took place in March. I prepared the text of the post together with my friend, who also participated in it.
In early February, we learned about the opportunity to participate in the international Russian-German school for students (Joint Advanced Student School), which is held in our city for the eighth time. Told us about it — coordinator (whose students we are, also this new learning platform has already been mentioned in one of on Habré), teacher и and just a very talented and passionate person. The school consisted of two thematic courses - a course on efficient algorithms for working on strings (Design of Efficient String Algorithms) and the development of modern mobile applications (Usability Engineering & Ubiquitous Computing on mobile devices).
The last course interested us, and we applied for participation. Therefore, the story will be mainly about this direction. To begin with, everyone had to go through a competitive selection: describe their own idea for an application that would be interesting for implementation, in demand among users and useful in the market, as well as make a short report on one of the topics proposed by the organizers of the school. The most interesting of them were: aspects of application development for Android/iOS, Test Driven Development, basic concepts of Smart Spaces/Internet of Things. The candidates prepared all the materials in English, thus showing that they would be able to find a common language with their German colleagues.
We were among thirteen of our students who passed the selection. Approximately the same number of children came from to our city with two leaders - Professor MTU , who also teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor , a specialist in Computer Science. The school lasted only five days (from March 19 to March 24), during which time we proposed our own ideas for mobile applications, chose the best ones and divided into three teams of 4-5 people each, developed prototypes. I really liked that all decisions, from ideas for mobile applications to planning where to go for a walk in the evening, were made by popular vote and everyone could express their wishes. All the teams were international, and it was only more interesting to work from this. The development process was carried out according to Scrum technology, the sprints were one day long, every evening we gathered for a scrum meeting, discussing the achievements and difficulties of each team over the past day. At every rally, Professor Bernd Brugge always asked each of us the question - what do YOU PROMISE to do tomorrow? The semantic and psychological emphasis was placed on these two words: you personally promise. It was impossible to respond in the style of: "we will do" or "I will try to start doing", the professor required the participant to answer, which begins with the words: "I promise." Of course, such an answer in front of colleagues set up a feeling of personal responsibility for the result and a desire to work hard tomorrow so that your own promise would not turn out to be an empty word. It seems to me that it was this small but very important lesson that turned out to be the most important thing that we learned from this school. This work ethic should be adopted by us from the Germans. We also noticed that German colleagues pay a lot of attention to careful planning, meetings and discussion of design activities. We, on the other hand, were eager to start developing and get the result as soon as possible. At first, it seemed to us that the approach to the work of our German colleagues was too long, but then we realized and made sure that planned work gives better productivity and stable results. In a short period of our cooperation, we have gained good experience in organizing work - planning, discussion and personal responsibility. These simple but important things are sometimes so lacking in our country.
All the time of our short cooperation, we worked in a very calm and friendly atmosphere between all the participants of the school. I must say that not all of the allocated time we were directly involved in the development of applications, one of the main factors in the success of the application on the market is the ability to interest the user. Therefore, we spent about one day on inventing and creating with our own hands a small commercial that reflects the essence of the application. Our team was developing an application that detects potholes on auto roads using an accelerometer. We ended up with this promotional video in the style of a Hollywood movie trailer:
On the last day of the school, a demonstration of our projects took place. In such a short time, all three teams achieved tangible results, we were surprised by the overall productivity! Our team showed two prototypes: for Android and for iOS. All applications had basic functionality that could be developed further.
On the evening of the last day, all school participants celebrated the successful completion at a banquet attended by JASS co-founders, famous mathematicians и . We managed to communicate with German students in a more informal setting, learn about the education system and work in the field of Computer Science and Software Engineering in Germany.
The JASS school has become an excellent broadening of horizons, exchange of experience and just a place for new professional contacts. All participants had extremely positive impressions. Many thanks to the organizers of the school for this, more such events in the future!
Source: www.habr.com