Dev Day @ Uva Wellassa University
This actually started off from a comment on a medium post that I wrote. President of the computer society of Uva Wellassa University, Dilantha Prasanjith commented on the post that I did on Google Summer of Code.
Then we carried on our conversation to have a real event. So we planned out the Dev Day on 12th of Feb 2016 at Uva Wellassa University. This was a difficult task to do alone therefore I reached out to my friends to get help where I got lot of positive feedback for this event. Finally I managed to gather 4 friends and proceed with the day.
It was tough at the same time exiting to travel to Badulla. Well we almost vomited along the trip ;)
Day started awesome and I covered my usual presentation on Google Summer of Code where my batch mate Dinal Kurukulasooriya(Machine Learning Engineer and the Founder of Bot Factory) did a session on Machine Learning for the students.
Senior Fellow in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of Moratuwa Heminda Jayaweera filled up the next slot with a session on “Innovation”.
After those three sessions we had the lunch break where we had our lunch in the the legendary canteen(ගැලරිය) of University of Uva Wellassa which had a very scenic view which covered a range of mountains.
Evening we had practical sessions where my fellow batch mate, Engineer -Technology at Virtusa, Shenal Senerath covered on Extreme programming. Where I covered on Maven and GIT. My fellow batch mate Sameera Sampath Nandasiri(Software Engineer at Ustocktrade) also joined with us to help the students with practical sessions.
Specialty of our session was we managed to engage students in conversations as well as get them to do real programming during the session which I think are highly important factors in learning.
Students were very friendly and very talented. After the sessions they gave us a small tour around the University of Uva Wellassa.
We did not have much time to enjoy the time since we all had to come to Colombo which was a 6+ hours drive. After couple of hours we drove towards Colombo while we managed to stop at few places for dinner and tea on the way.
It was a fruitful as well as a fun filled journey. I highly encourage everyone to spend some time to give back what you learnt to the education system in Sri Lanka, since if we do not do that, no one else would. :)
PS : We started off a small foundation type of thingy, but quite not sure how it would flourish in the future. Our main target is to support equal opportunity in education. We do not have any restrictions as to private of public sector but we consider the entire education system as a whole where people should give back in the long run. We also put a cute name to it as Sustainable Education Foundation(SEF) ;). If you would like to support us or need our support please do contact us.
Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/sustainableeducationfoundation/
Youtube Channel :
