Rix Bits

Today I’m in Cincinnati at the Midwest Regional Mock Competition for HSCC, supporting our high school student team, and helping to serve as one of the judges during the competition.  Regional competitions are a great way for our students to begin to get a feel for what they can expect in the actual national competition in August. 

Aside from a slightly abbreviated time schedule and fewer teams to compete against, the regional mock competition offers a pretty accurate representation of the real thing.  The Cincinnati chapter of BDPA put a

We’re back again with another year of the BDPA High School Computer Competition.  We’ve got some new students as well as our returning students, and we’re already well on our way to getting up to speed on web application development! Thanx to Devry University for donating space in their facilities for our class. 

In our classes, we learn web app development using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Web Developer Express tool – basically, a light version of the same industry-standard integrated development environment (IDE) that many .NET

Well, we’ve closed the books on 2010. :)  As I reflected back, I thought it would be nice to look at all the kool geek stuff I’ve been able to be a part of this year.  2010 marks the beginning of my journey into full-time SharePoint consulting, but there were also some other memorable techie moments as well.  Let’s see….

The results are in – the BDPA Columbus team scored 12th out of 22 teams in the 25th Annual BDPA High School Computer Competition! Congratulations team!

Here’s a few key facts to put this achievement in perspective:

The high school students are currently wrapping up the final part of their computer competition.  Kudos to all of them for hanging in there. Today was an 8am – 4pm all day marathon for them, as they work together throughout the day to finish a challenge programming assignment.  This year’s assignment centered around a fictional construction company, and involved many aspects, including the design of a login interface, a Requests for Proposal submission form, and a system to generate estimates based on construction costs.  I anxiously await hearing back from the students to see how they think they did.

The High School Computer Competition is an important part of the BDPA conference, whose focus is on highlighting and developing the African-American presence in the IT industry.  I also find it interesting that this same week there are a couple more conferences of similar perspective going on.  The National Association of Black Journalists Conference is happening this week in San Diego (10TV’s Jerry Revish told me about that one as we both waited to board the plane leaving Columbus), and this week also marks the 100th anniversary and conference of the National Urban League.

So, lots of history going on this week.  Let’s see if our BDPA Columbus team can also make history in their competition today.  Go Team Go! :-)

This week I will be traveling to Philadelphia with a group of talented high school students as we all attend the 2010 Black Data Processors Association (BDPA) National Conference.  These high school students have spent almost every Saturday morning with me for the past few months learning ASP.NET web development skills in order to compete in this year’s BDPA High School Computer Competition (HSCC) at the Conference.  I’ve been teaching concepts such as object-oriented programming, master page development, and page event handling.  And I believe their Saturday commitments will pay off, as I’ve seen them make great progress in their understanding of the concepts.

It should be a great event for all of us.  In addition to the Competition, the Conference includes a Youth Technology Camp, Career Fair, Technology Expo, and great workshops on topics like ‘IT Workforce Development’, ‘Business Process Management’, and ‘Cloud Computing’.  And of course there’s the National BDPA Golf Classic, which I would attend if I had any golf skillz whatsoever. :- )

Expect to see a retrospective post from me once I return, and feel free to follow my real-time Tweets live from the conference using the hashtag #BDPA.

Maybe I’ll see you there! :- )

This weekend in Columbus, Ohio a whole room full of smart people are giving their time to make websites for non-profit organizations.  It’s called Give Camp, and it’s a 3-day all-night marathon of coding goodness.  Local developers work thru the wee hours of the night helping organizations with their tech needs. Follow the official Twitter hashtag (#cmhgc) to see real-time tweets and pictures.

I couldn’t participate myself, partly because I do a little techie volunteering myself on Saturdays.  I help teach .NET web development to high school students through the local chapter of BDPA and the HSCC program, a national competition which this year will take place in Philadelphia.  Today they learned a little more about accessing MySQL databases with .NET (explaining datasets and connection strings to teenagers is not as easy as you might think). :)  I’m proud to say that they’re doing a great job grasping the material, including object-oriented concepts.

It’s great to see Central Ohio talent giving back to the community.  I hope the Give Camp folks can stay awake long enough to dot[notation] every I[nterface] and cross every [app domain] T[hread]. ;-)