Roweb attended a series of events at the Sanitary High School as part of the “Europe Code Week” program, in partnership with the “Ion Cantacuzino” Parents’ Association and the Techsoup Association.
The events were addressed to high school students, with the purpose of teaching them about design thinking, creating a prototype and web development in PHP. Our colleagues, Marius Baltag, Senior Software Developer, and Madalina Stolniceanu, IT Project Manager, held a high school workshop. Then, working in teams, the students developed software products for the healthcare sector, which were evaluated by a jury that included Marius, and the best apps received awards.
During the presentation, Madalina and Marius told the students about what it means to be a programmer at Roweb, what kind of projects we work on and what kind of technologies we use.
They gave them examples from their personal experience showing why it is important to carefully choose your way in life, and if you feel you have to change direction, it is important to have the courage to do it. They made recommendations on what and how to learn to get the best results, not just for an exam but for the students’ long-term career.
During the workshop, Marius demonstrated in real-time how to organize and write a web application using MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture.
Through the applications presented at the competition, the students demonstrated that they took advantage of the information they received and understood how they can apply and gain concrete benefits from that knowledge.
We took this opportunity to talk to the students and learn more about the challenges they face, as well as to Mrs. Catalina Enescu, the teacher who coordinated these initiatives. She explained that the reason why she invited us to participate in these events was that she knew from events organized by the University of Pitesti that we are open to this type of collaborations, that we offer quality information and that it would be a good opportunity to start a long-term collaboration with us.
“We started from the idea of motivating students to work in teams on projects based on the need to solve a community issue, learning the technology and the necessary tools being a means, not an end in itself. What is taught in school could be a useful exercise for what follows if it is better correlated with reality. Students are more motivated after such meetings because what they hear is a confirmation that they are on the right track, and that what they learn at school is still grounded in reality. Beyond what the curriculum involves, the relationship within the community (gymnasium, high school, university, companies) can greatly change the stundents’ perspective”, the professor told us.
We were very pleased to have the opportunity to support these efforts and to discuss what software companies can do to help better align what students learn and what is required in the IT work market. We hope that in the future we can be even more helpful in this respect and support the development of future programmers as efficiently as possible.
