This event was one of a number of events marking the launching of the Android Developer Challenge Sub-Saharan Africa 2011 in all the 14 countries in Sub Saharan africa taking part in the competition.
Overview of the event
The event to launch Android Developer Challenge – SSA which took place on 30th April 2011 was a great success in many ways. During preparation of the event we focused mainly in publicizing the event to colleges and higher learning institutions around Dar-es-salaam, and we had an initial estimate of getting around 70 attendees.but on the day of the event about 130 people showed up, from both universities and start-up IT companies around.
Nature of the audience
In the group of all attendees the number of those who had previous experience with building apps for Android Platform was fairly small, but most of them were experienced in JAVA. After a brief introduction to the platform which was followed by a “hello world” demo most people realized how feasible it was to write apps for android
Presentations
The event started with a little introductory remarks from the Director General of Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) Dr Hassan Mshinda .
David Kagoma, Dar es Salaam GTUG co-manager was the next speaker up, introducing Dar GTUG to the audience and then went to give a detailed presentation on the android developer challenge SSA .
The next presentation was done by Joachim Mangilima, another Dar es Salaam GTUG co-manager who introduced the Android platform. He also spoke a little on how to install and configure the SDK in both Windows and Linux.
This was followed by the “Hello World” demo in which he showed how to debug Android apps using the emulator.
Tony Severine, was up next entertaining attendees with the Android trivia game, before Rosarion Arun finished things off with a presentation on Code and Project management.
View of attendees with regard of Launch event and the competition
Most attendees expressed how delighted they were to take part in the launch of the competition including all the information that they received during the event. Nahid Valli a student from Dar es salaam Institute of Technology, DIT wrote an email specifically thanking the organizers of the event for raising the awareness among students about the android platform and software development associated with it For those who participated the event, it has been an absolute eye opener, showing them possibility of exploiting different opportunities that are available in the mobile industry.
Participation in Competition
About 50 people who were in the event registered their names indicating that they will take part in the competition.
Way forward
Taking into account how well the competition has been received we find it imperative that we provide more support to those who are participating in the competition so that on 1st June they can make strong submissions in the competition.
We have planned to hold weekly peer-app-reviews with teams that are participating in the competition. This will enable participants to have a common place they can meet every week to exchange ideas on their apps and help each other in solving some of the challenges that they face. Reviews will start on 7th May and continue up the date of submission of apps to the competition.
Also we are targeting to use these weekly reviews for live testing of apps in real android devices that some of DarGTUG managers have.
We are confident that this initiative will help more teams from Tanzania to take part in the competition and submit even better apps.
Please follow the following link to see pictures from the event, goo.gl/Q1p12
To keep up to date with what is happening with those who are going to take part part in the challenge please register your self on Dar es Salaam GTUG mailing list located at https://groups.google.com/group/dargtug
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