I’m very pleased to announce that today we have started the preliminary activities of the BlackBerry Innovation Center at UFAL (Federal University of Alagoas). Our main goal is to create a BlackBerry developers community inside the university as well as develop apps to BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook.
We have selected 10 students (among 23 students that applied for the process) that will work in the Innovation Center projects after a very hard process of skills revision based on their academic history, a test with 2 logic questions and 1 programming challenging; and finally a technical interview where each student was questioned about their programming skills, about if they like reading, how is their english level (writing, reading and in some cases we talked to them in english) and we finished each interview providing to the student a very difficult logic/programming challenging.
For a practical starting, today we began a Web-based software development training provided by Nicholas Fazio, a BlackBerry Elite Member and one of our student that will work in the BlackBerry Innovation Center. The training plan is:
- General: About Deploying Apps to BlackBerry 10 Devices
- General: How to Use Git for Version Control
- General: Introduction to Databases: A Focus on MySQL and SQLite
- General: PHP to Support Mobile Apps (JSON and Web Services)
- General: Software Product Line
- WebWorks: The Basic of HTML 5, JS, JQuery/Mobile and BBUi.js
- WebWorks: Advanced Topics of JQuery/JQueryMobile and BBUi.js
- WebWorks: Advanced Tools for Developing BlackBerry 10 Apps
- WebWorks: Introduction to Sencha and Titanium (Appcelerator)
- Native: The Basic of C/C++ and Qt
- Native: The Basic of Cascades for BlackBerry 10
- Native: Advanced Topics of Cascades
Some pictures during the first course today:
The selected students are (in alphabetic order):
- Anderson Sampaio
- Camilo Campos
- Diego Raphael
- Dielson Carvalho
- Fagner Garrote
- Felipe Crispim
- Felipe Gualberto
- Július KCesar
- Marden Laairoy
- Randy Ambrósio
The BlackBerry Innovation Center is only possible because of the hard work from the following people that I really thank (in alphabetic order):
- Demian Borba – BlackBerry Developer Evangelist at RIM
- Evandro Costa - Professor at UFAL
- Leandro de Sales (me) – Professor at UFAL and Blackberry Elite
- Márcio Ribeiro - Professor at UFAL
- Nicholas Fazio – Student and BlackBerry Elite Member
- Rodrigo Peixoto – Application Developer Consultant at RIM
The BlackBerry Innovation Center is under my laboratory umbrella called
COMPE (Pervasive Computing Laboratory) at the Computing Institute of UFAL. The BlackBerry Innovation Center is an initiative of COMPE/IC/UFAL and BlackBerry/RIM. I’m very much happy to make this happen, as the same time excited because I know that the next months I will work with smart and tallent people involved in this project.
Let’s do it!
Warm regards,
Leandro.
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