DSC Lead - September 2019
I spoke with my Lecturer, Mr Idara Akpan about the club. Spoke with my friend Rebecca Patrick, I made sure she was aware of every step taken for the club, on 10th September, I left to Lagos in preparation for the submit, I flew from Lagos to Accra with other leads.
At the submit, I asked questions concerning the challenge on my campus, the lack of gadgets and electricity. I was told to find out what works for my community and adopt a strategy that works.
While at the summit, I spoke with Former Leads about my school, they shared their experience and how they went about establishing DSC in their school.
Now back to school, I went with my team and met with my HOD, we told him to guide us to get the club established in School so that we can access to school properties like computer room, generator and projector.
He accepted to be part of us, He said we have 2 options to establish the club:
Organize workshops as a student thing, without printing banners or fliers for it, run adverts online for awareness and organize online meetings, if we intend to meet physically, we host meetings using a venue outside school. but we leverage on the school by sharing hand fliers to students instead of using the notice boards.
We write a letter to the school founder, through the Rector, through the Dean of the Department, that we want the club to be established on campus, he said the method will take a longer time to work. We told him we’ll do method 2.
He said he'll support us. The team that went there were Miracle Ozukalu, Rebecca Jerome, Peace Ikpe, Victor Red.
Next stop was to see the Dean of the Department Mr Nseobong, He said he’s particular about students being skilled, he was happy about the initiative, he said he’ll work with us to get the club established on campus, He said we should go write a letter and address it to the founder of the school. He’ll help us push the letter for approval.
We also met with the Deputy Rector, Mr Akin, He said he wants to be sure students will be certified after undergoing courses on the Grow with Google platform, he said they were a team that came to school, dropped a proposal to train students on ICT, the team promised to certify the students but after the training, they failed to give the students certificates, so He has to be sure of the Grow with Google plans, He said we should work with 2 students, if they get certified, he’ll help push the club for it to be established on campus. We told him it’s not like Google will be sending people to school to train the students, Google is opening up resources to students, so the students will enrol for the courses and get skilled, every lesson is done online, the essence of the physical meetings is to help each other grow faster, we’ll organize Cloud study JAM, Speakers sessions, Info Sessions to help the club bond. He insisted that provided they’ll be a course, students must be certified, we agreed to work with 2 students.
That night, I had a talk with my core team on how to go about it, we agreed to work with the people who already have an idea of tech on campus,
I spoke with Muhammed Auwal about it, He said if I can attest those people are skilled in those areas, he’ll work with Aniedi to certify them. I told the people involved to build a project and host on GitHub.
We set a target for the core team, to address all the department in the school. If you’re in Computer Science, you’re to address all computer science from ND1 to HND2. This method was not that effective as students were not willing to listen to their peers so we changed strategy by exchanging it, if you’re in compeer science, you address people in Computer Engineering, someone from engineering will address Computer Science department.
This method was more effective. That month, our membership grew to about 30 students.
We still had a challenge with where to meet. We needed a room that can be powered and we can use a projector for our meetings.