You can choose to differ with me
but it is the harsh reality that our Universities is the main reason most of
the Tanzania ICT professionals eliminate programming as their career option.
Most of the students with interest in programming and developing applications
have been witnessing their dreams cut short. You might say what is the reason
behind and why are you blaming the syllabus that describe clearly that the
students is practicing all the basic languages that a computer science student,
IT student or Computer engineering student should study whither is Java,
C-language, C++, Data Structures, Visual Basic and others. But believe me
displaying in the syllabus and practicing the syllabus to reach to the student’s
requirement and be able to prepare the students as a programmer these are two
different things.
When I was in second year Computer
Science students at my college I got a chance to admit two guys from University
of Dar es Salaam who just now appear to be my best friends. The first one was college
dropout of engineering background and the other one college dropout of Computer
Science first year. With other challenges they face the main reason for the
computer science dropout to quit University of Dar es Salaam, his father who
just appear to be a civil engineer realizes his son was not having lab sessions
in whatever is practicing and if he had the opportunity it was just for the
purpose of passing the exams meaning that, clamming few lines of codes ready to
answer the exams then that’s it. He was not ready to face the challenges that
are coming outside there for programmers .The guy was even surprised to see
that it is compulsory to attend lab and have the lab record book and submit
project report for almost every language you are practicing at the college when
he was admitted to our college. I remember him asking me that if during the
exams the lab results counts, I told him without passing the lab exams you are
not going to get your degree and it means you have to pay another ticket fees
to come and clear your mess in the fourth year after finishing your course if
you didn’t attend third year’s lab.
This is what makes people to develop interest in coding in
most of the universities overseas and reputed universities in Africa coding is
taken seriously since it is what distinguish a Computer science student
(software engineering student) from other people in the industry. It is so
disturbing to see someone graduated with clean and sensational GPA but he
cannot even declare variables in C-Language or explains to you the concept of
function overloading in Java and do it practically. In universities like
Harvard and other reputed universities they consider coding as the measurement
of students creativity and involvement in the study while to us is just another
exam you have to pass. I wonder that’s why each college graduate you ask in Dar
es Salaam want to be a network professional. Am not saying this is not good but
for a country like ours were by we have few resources and most of the people
are poor and cannot even afford to buy a router to practice at home how do you
expect them to be good network administrators or engineers. I say programming
is the get way for people who are coming in the tough background all you do is
to download Borland C, NetBeans, Eclipse or whatever and up you go start to develop
your applications don’t wait for the college to teach you or the college to
accomplish whatever is mentioned in the syllabus course that will never happen.
Final advice programming is an art;
you have to develop passion on it in order to understand it. Don’t create a state
of mind that told you it is hard to code believe me it is easier hundreds time
compared to networking and system administration if you decide to practice and
be frequent on it. They are a lot of resource available online W3Schools is
there waiting for you to go and practice. Youtube videos for beginners training
for each and every possibly known computer language go and try out because the
University will never give you that. You can even go for the bigger projects
and download them; there is a lot of open source projects waiting for people to
exploit them for example PHP project OpenCMS, Orange HRM, Open Source Commerceand others. For Java students you can always Google for free projects available
online download them and edit the codes and start developing the interfaces. If
you want to for Visual Basic or C# am there for you with a lot of projects
contact me I will give them to you personally. By the way it is my way of giving
back to the community. For although who have read this article and they are PHP and MySQL developers am giving this gift to them OPENCART . Have fun with coding guys ……….
By Jumanne Mtambalike
By Jumanne Mtambalike