If there’s something that I’d do all day, that’d be to code. This got inculcated in me because I was inspired by amazing developers out there when I was in my school. I strived hard to become one of them. I started learning various things on my own as early as I was in my 10th grade. I started making mods, apps, learnt quite a lot of things about CS at an early age. All by attending sessions, devjams, codelabs by GDGs and other communities. Later, I decided to give back to the community by taking various workshops on Android, GCP etc. I need not have done this. But, I did. Because, I figured that the ultimate happiness is in sharing the things you know with others and inspiring people through that.
I always wanted to do something much better for the students in my college (SRM University). I was told about the Applied CS with Android program and I couldn’t be any happier. What is applied CS? Applied Computer Science with Android is a Google initiative to help university students understand and apply computer science concepts using the Android platform. Some of the concepts include Binary Search and Application State, Trees, Priority, Queues, Graph traversal,Dynamic Programming. I felt that it is the perfect program through which students can gain practical working knowledge on various concepts in Applied CS. Being an Android developer and with the years of practical experience, I did not hesitate a bit to take this up forward at my University.
Facilitator nomination and bootcamp :
I was nominated along with several other students by my University for being the facilitator. But, to become the facilitator, you had to be different. I always felt that I’m different but this was a real one. We were told to explain any difficult concept easily under 1 minute. I sat down, thought about it and decided to make this video. Eventually, I was selected as the Facilitator to my University. We were asked to attend the facilitator bootcamp in Bangalore where we had some amazing sessions on technical and presentation skills. It felt great when Googlers identified me as “Darth Vader” [You’ll know if you had seen that video ;)]
The Workshop :
It was time to build the team. We began recruiting new candidates for Google Students Club of SRM University. Right after they joined, they were sent out to make preparations and promotions for Applied CS with Android program. We had an amazing response when we started taking in registrations. A whooping number of 550 students signed up for the course. Sadly, we had only 30 seats. We selected the best 30 out 550. We decided to go with the continuous 7 day version of the workshop. The travel was a bit strenuous because I had to commute over 30kms to reach the University. But as always, I was very excited because teaching is exciting. You get to learn things as well. There was this instance where people couldn’t use Android Studio because restricted access in the University. I learnt about enabling proxy on Android Studio and this was something new. At the end of the workshop, we had devjams where the students created some amazing games and apps. Kudos to the entire GSC team in helping me pulling off a great workshop. It’s going to get more exciting. The 2nd version of the Applied CS with Android workshop is being planned. Stay tuned.
