Build2Learn: An event where students learnt to build

At KCG college we believe in the holistic development of our students and therefore give them every opportunity to develop the different facets of their capabilities. One such initiative is a weekend Programming Club open to all our 1^st year students from any stream. The virtual Club session is held once a week over Microsoft Teams, for a 2-hour period and has been taking place for over three months now. During the club sessions we taught our students basic Python programming, built simple games using PyGameZeroand also worked on building desktop applications using PySimpleGUI. After our students reached a certain level of expertise, we thought it would be a more wholesome learning process if they could make fully functional apps with the coding they had just learnt.

With this thought in mind,we launched the Build2Learn event and were amazed by the overwhelming response we received from our students. For the event,the students decided to group themselves into teams of three and each team was asked to come up with a unique app with the coding they had learnt. Although they were just beginner programmers, they came up with brilliant project ideas and each team competed to make sure that their project was the best. The sincerity and dedication of our students was commendable. One team explained their project idea to their staff and said, “Ma’am, don’t worry about the complexity, we are a 3-member team and we can do it. Just tell us if this idea is good”.

The teamwork displayed by the students was exceptional, as each team worked together to complement the strengths and weaknesses of their team-mates. After not being able to meet for months together, the team environment helped students improve their connectivity with one another and gave them the opportunity to learn & work together. Our students had constant virtual meetings to discuss about their projects and were also guided by our staff to fine tune their ideas. What moved us the most was that our students not only helped their teammates, but also helped students from other teams whenever and wherever they could.

Over the years we have noticed that our students can show great responsibility when tasked with the role of decision making. With that background, we asked our students to come up with a realistic deadline for their projects and after a brief discussion, they came to a consensus to submit their projects by the first week of February. We scheduled a demo session on 7^th February, Sunday, before which every team had their project uploaded on GitHub and had done the necessary documentation for the same. There was a total of 16 projects that were submitted to be presented for the demo.

On the day of the demo each team presented their projects with passion. Every team explained the functionalities of their project and how they achieved them. All 16 projects were amazing and it was pleasantly surprising to see how the students had put together all they had learnt to such creative use. On seeing their spectacular projects, we were convinced that the learnings they gained from building their projects, far outweighed the learnings they received during the club sessions. Once again, the Blended Method of theoretical & practical learning followed by our college has proven to make learning an enjoyable and productive experience for our students.

We applaud the commitment and enthusiasm shown by our staff & students!

Below are the links to the demo videos of a few projects:

• A mobile simulator – build using Tkinter, PySimpleGUI and Pygame.
• A voice assistant app
• An instagram bot
• An app for restaurants
• Healthcare App
• Voice Assistant for your pc