YPG Student Workshops

The past year has seen the Guildford Branch of the YPG launch its Student Workshop program at the University of Surrey. The series was split over the two semesters and consisted of 13 two hour workshops held on Tuesday evenings. The following is a summary of the topics covered.

Open Source Software

Our launch event was very well attended and introduced some of the technologies we planned to cover throughout the rest of the workshop. We provided a CD containing various Open Source software which the students could install on their own machines. We included a distribution of Knoppix and Virtual Machine software to allow students easy access to Linux.

We also introduced the first stream of the workshops, Java Mobile Development. The initial example utilised the NetBeans Mobile Development kit to get a simple Hello World example running. It also allowed us to ensure that all attendees had the required software setup and working.

Java Mobile Phone Development

Java Mobile Phone Development uses a cut-down version of the full Java Development Kit and provides and interesting and fun way to introduce programming concepts and Java. We introduced the basic concepts of Object Orientated programming and Java, including Classes, Methods, Properties and inheritance. We discussed the Graphics object within Java and how to paint on the Canvas (the screen displayed by the Mobile Application). We provided a skeleton class that the students could add code to in order to create the equivalent Hello World program that had been created by the wizard the previous week.

Java Mobile Project

Over the next few workshops we covered various aspects of Java Mobile Development whilst gradually building a simple game of Pang. Pang is a classic arcade game that involves shooting at balls, which then split in to two balls of half the original size. The goal is to destroy the all the balls without being hit by any. This application provided an opportunity to investigate all of the following:

• Painting of Images on a Canvas
• Capturing Key Presses by the User
• Simple Animation (moving objects etc)
• Playing Sounds
• Collision Detection
• Data Storage

Lego Mindstorms

The second stream of the workshops used the Lego Mindstorms kit and the Lejos development kit. Normally Lego Mindstorms uses its own development environment and programming language to program the robots. The Lejos toolkit allows users to develop program that can be run on the robots that have been written in Java. It is similar to the Java Mobile platform in that it uses a cut-down version of Java, the Lejos runtime is even smaller than mobile runtime.

We built a simple robot that can be seen in the picture to the right. Naturally it was nicknamed "Jonny Five". It consisted of three motors, two for driving the wheels and one for turning the head. The head was an ultrasonic distance sensor which provided feedback on how close the robot was to objects around it. By mounting it on a motor it provided a method of detecting objects anywhere around the robot. Various tasks were given to the students to develop simple Lejos applications. Generally a small obstacle course was set up that the robot had to navigate. The students progressed from hard coded actions to using the sensors to evaluate the surroundings to choose the best option to take.

Standalone Workshops

As well as having the two main streams as part of the workshop we have also head a number of one-off workshops to cover relevant topics. Further details of the workshops held are below.

Introduction to Networking

This workshop was delivered by Dr Roger Peel from the University of Surrey and provided an introduction to the basics of networking. It covered topics like DHCP, NAT and a discussion of the TCP/IP protocol. Hands on examples were provided for setting up networks in both Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Managing a Web Server

This was a follow on workshop to the Introduction to Networking and introduced the techniques behind configuring an Apache Web Server and the relevant applications that are likely to be found on a web server. A demo server was setup on a private network that allowed the students to log in and play around with the technologies that had been discussed during the workshop.

Content Management Systems

During the workshop we demonstrated Joomla, an Open Source content management system. We discussed the pros and cons of using a Content Management System and highlighted examples of their use. We went through the steps to manually install and setup Joomla on a typical web server. As part of the practical part of the workshop we provided a Virtual Machine to each student so that they could run their own Virtual Web Server complete with Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. They then could install Joomla onto this setup and play around with it in a safe environment.

Podcasting

David Williams, a PhD Student from the Department and YPG Representative, delivered the workshop on podcasting. It covered the underlying technologies, benefits of their use and a step by step guide to creating a podcast. We also covered enhanced podcasts and provided links to the tools that could be used to create and edit your own podcasts. During the practical session the students were helped to create their own podcasts and upload them to our server. You can view an example enhanced podcast by clicking here. It consists of the presentation slides from David overlaid with video clips of him giving the workshop. This podcast was created whilst workshop was being conducted as a demonstration of how easy and quick it can be. The music in the podcast is from http://www.podsafeaudio.com/ and is by Everyday Jones who released it under the Creative Commons License.

Digital Watermarking

The workshop covered an area of research within the Department of Computing. It provided an introduction to the techniques and uses of Digital Watermarking. During the practical session there was an opportunity for students to take a skeleton Java class and add the required code to embed data using the Least Significant Bit method. The workshop highlighted the importance of imperceptibility and the history of digital watermarking.

Internet Security and Privacy

This was a topical workshop that highlighted the importance of internet security in protecting privacy as well as highlighting some potential privacy dangers that currently exist on the internet. We covered topics like SQL injection, cookies and HTTP Get/Post methods. We also highlighted the problems of non-SSL based login and discussed the recent Phorm advertising system.

The Future

This was very much a test year for us to see what did and did not work. We are currently planning our workshop for next year, so if you have any ideas on what you would like to see, please get in touch. As this was our first year we only targeted students within the University, however, we hope to expand this further next year.

Thanks

I would like to thank all of the following: Dr Roger Peel for his assistance in planning and delivering the workshops, David Williams for his assistance during the workshops, Angus Chisholm for his help in planning the workshops and for his assistance during the workshops practical sessions, David Pizarro for his help during the workshop delivery and his efforts in working out the best way to do collision detection, the Department of Computing at the University of Surrey for allowing us to use the seminar room.