Building a SHIP - Guest Stars

Much like the Love Boat had every week, at CSTUY SHIP, we too have our guest stars.

On the one hand, it's important to have a focused program that leaves the shipmates empowered to continue their CS studies on their own. That means the shipmates have to explore something with sufficient depth so that the learning sticks. It also means there has to be sufficient depth for the shipmates to continue their voyages after our month together has ended.

On the other hand, we want to present the big picture as well. There are a lot of interesting things in computer science and technology that we really can't get to in just a few weeks. Certainly not if we want to do justice to those topics.

Having one off lectures helps. This way, our shipmates are exposed to a wide array of voices and ideas.

Of course, scheduling the right speakers at the right time can be a challenge. Too technical too early can be a turn off. So can too simple.

We're lucky enough to have some amazing guest stars on our ship. We started with a great talk on UX by Cynthia Koo. UX is something I wish kids were more exposed to and I think it was great that Cynthia was able to talk to the shipmates about it before they embark on their own projects. If we set the seeds early and have user experience in the back of the shipmates heads before they start building things, I suspect that the end results will show it.

Cynthia talked about user needs and business needs and used looked at Instagram and Snapchat as case studies.

The talk got the shipmates thinking about apps in a way they had never considered before.

Today we had our second guest star. Edgar Troudt. Edgar talked about innovation, disruption, crowd consumption and more.

Later on, we'll drill down with more technical talks.

For now, though, these talks were meant to give a broader view and to inspire. I think they did.