We organized a three day Flex Boot Camp for engineering students in Hyderabad on 29th Feb, 2008, 1st March, 2008 and 2nd March, 2008. We had 800 participants from various engineering colleges in Hyderabad, who attended this camp. The event was organized with help of KMIT College, Hyderabad. The KMIT staff held a major hand in making this event successful. T-shirts and participation certificates were distributed to the students, who participated in the hands on session and the contest.
This Boot Camp was an amazing experience. It was amazing to see the enthusiasm they had in learning about Flex and AIR. After each session, students surrounded the speaker and showered questions. We met students who had different levels of knowledge on Flex. There were lots of engineering students who were already developing applications using Flex and were asking questions on how to use Blaze DS and also on how to integrate Flex with Dot NET. Though it was a whole day event, I could see students taking down notes for each and every session.
Snaps
On 29th Feb, 2008
We started off with a welcome speech and speech by Niel (CEO, Teleparadigms) followed by presentations by Ramesh and Ananth on Flex, AIR and RIA.
On 1st March, 2008
We started off at 8:30 AM. Ramesh spoke about AS3, MXML and list based controls. Ananth spoke about events, data binding and collections in Flex. Jyoti explained how to use different controls and containers in Flex. I gave presentation on data connectivity using Flex. After the sessions were completed, all the teams had to take a screening test to participate in the hands on session as well as the contest. 250 teams took the screening test. We had to select 80 teams out of 250 teams; this was a difficult task as we had to evaluate 250 papers and we had to see the disappointment in the faces of the teams, who did not clear the screening test. While the screening test was in progress, we conducted a question and answers session for the students waiting for their team mates to complete the test. The student who answers the question gets to take a t-shirt or a Flex book.
On 2nd March, 2008
We conducted a contest. Students had to develop applications using Flex in 6 hours. We came up with four different types of applications; teams had to select one application and develop that. The applications developed by the teams were amazing (I will post the application which we liked, as soon as possible). I can bet, you will not believe that those applications were developed in 6 hours. The winning team selected a web version of the iPod, which we called the SoftPod. The SoftPod application allowed the user to select either videos or images. The application plays the videos and on clicking on the video, it displays the set of options like dragging the video, pause, change volume. The image portion included zoom.
The runners up team developed a presentations creator. This application allows user to create presentations, add slides to the presentation, add images to the slides, add text to the slides and you can also select the slide enter and exit transition effects for the slides. Once the presentations are created, you can view the presentations using the application.
Posted by Sujit Reddy G 
