PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (August 18, 2021) – This summer’s App Development Training Sessions gave Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) participants vital tools for engaging state-of-the-art technologies. These sessions are the first of many achievements to come, resulting from the year-old association of PVAMU with Tennessee State University, which is leading the HBCU C2 learning initiative.
In many cases, equipped with hardware donated to Prairie View A&M by Apple as part of the initiative, PVAMU faculty, staff and students over three weeks engaged in hands-on learning of the basics of building iOS apps using Apple’s Swift programming language.
Meeting over nine three-hour classes under the tutelage of Yonggao Yang, professor and head of the PVAMU Computer Science Department, workshop participants built an app during each class. They started with a basic app that said “Hello, world” with the click of a button, becoming progressively more complex over the following three weeks. Apps built during the fifth and sixth classes consolidated social media into one location and utilized embedded audio and video, respectively.
Lealon Martin, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a workshop participant, called it an “intensive” three weeks. “Nine days, three hours each isn’t really enough, but the way [Dr. Yang] did it, with each class getting gradually more complex, was very effective,” Martin said. “We learned the basic features you need to create an app environment and the basic coding structures you’ll need in order to build an app. If you have an idea, you learn what you need to convert it into an app that does what you want it to do.”
Another workshop participant, Clarence Willams, a sophomore PVAMU computer science student, said this was his first formal training in app development beyond what he has done on his own online. He saw the workshop as an opportunity to stand out in his chosen field of cybersecurity. His ultimate goal is “to learn how to build a security app, something that Tony Stark would do. All jokes aside, I’m still coming up with ideas.”
Musa Olaka, PVAMU’s director of Libraries and the primary point of contact for the HBCU C2 initiative at PVAMU, was also a workshop participant this summer. “This is predominantly faculty and staff who need to be brought up to speed on technology,” he said. “We want to create a situation where people at HBCUs are not just consumers of apps made by other people. We want them to be able to make apps that solve problems on campus or in their classrooms.”
Amplifying this theme, Olaka pointed to the broader goals of the Apple HBCU C2 initiative (the C2, or “C squared,” stands for “Coding and Creativity”).
“When you look at the number of minorities in technology, you come to realize that they are highly underrepresented,” Olaka said. “The number of females in IT are similarly underrepresented. And you realize that if we don’t jump on the bandwagon, our students, faculty and staff will be left behind. The larger goal of C2 is to increase participation of HBCUs in IT, and also to grow communities around HBCUs to embrace technology to solve problems, but to start, we must educate our people and arm them with the necessary technology skills.”
Olaka said that while the Computer Science Department has long had a curriculum that exposes its students to cutting-edge technology, this summer’s workshop was purposely geared to the rest of the university community.
“You come to realize that app development is not a pure computer science undertaking,” said Olaka. “We want to bring in people in music, the arts, humanities, education and all other spheres so that those apps can help solve problems. Dr. Yang, Dr. [Alphonso] Keaton, and Dr. [Maduakolam] Ireh have been instrumental in developing two new courses for non-computer science students at Prairie View A&M University, and the first course will be offered this fall. And also this fall, the program will expand to surrounding schools in the external community.”
Martin, a newbie to apps who said he utilizes coding and programming to do his own computational engineering research, sees three very specific purposes to learning the ins and outs of app development. One is the value that can accrue in academics, with people on campus making data and research available on an app-based platform and possibly using the technology as a ready method of enhancing collaboration. (“Anyone who has a smartphone is comfortable and familiar with using apps,” Martin said. “It’s becoming more ubiquitous in our lives; I’m on the device all day.”)
The other purposes, he said, have to do with business development and with the broader context of “actively engaging the next generation of technologies that will shape future phases of the information age.” Martin added, “We develop a lot of research that is potentially commercializable, and it could be through an app. But if you don’t know how to develop an app, that’s a whole pipeline that is left untapped. So having the ability, or at least the understanding, of how apps are developed, I think, is extremely important. It’s the way we do business now.”
And the look of the future. “All of these technologies are evolving as app-driven,” Martin said. “So having a basic understanding of how apps are developed, and growing that understanding into a hard, fundamental skill set will position Prairie View students, faculty, and staff to fully participate in the coming economy — not as bystanders and consumers, but as drivers and innovators.”
By Andrew Cohen
-PVAMU-