Shipping a product

Back in April, I was at the second annual "Dream It, Code It, Win It!" awards. Some of our kids had submitted work and were selected as awardees in the high school division.

It was great to see Jack and David Cahn there. Jack and David were both members of winning high school teams last year and they were back as college winners this time around.

It was great to see them.

The Cahn brothers spent some time talking to the current crop. They mentioned one thing that really confirmed that I've been on the right track with my SoftDev class - they said it was their most valuable experiece at Stuy because they learned how to ship a product. To take something, as a team, from idea to delivery with all the bumps along the way. Now, obviously, we don't do everything - there are no questions of funding for instance and I think we cover a lot of great CS but giving the kids a chance to learn to take a project from idea to delivery and all that entails was a big part of the design of the course.

With that in mind, I just finished evaluating projects and here's a sampling:

Stuy kids live all over the city. Nadia, Aida, and Sydney solved the problem of where to meet your friends when you live on opposite sides of town:

Miranda, Leslia, and Anya built a Chrome plugin and server to summarize articles:

and Philipp, Richard, Steve, and Ziwei created an anonymous author attribution system:

Not a SoftDev project, but for good measure, here's Natan and Angelika's Ballroom Dance project - apparently they're the first two to actually do a SONG and dance and they've both got the pipes:

There were lots of other great projects all up on github: https://github.com/stuycs-softdev/student-work-spring-2015 albeit in a rather disorganized form.

So proud of the work they all did this year.