Michelle and Julian on SQL and JavaDB, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

Today, Julian and I gave our first lecture to the class on SQL and JavaDB. We spent a lot of time trying to polish our slides before the lecture. Of course, we also practiced giving our talk a million times so that we got it down. During the actual presentation I found it a little nerve-wracking while since we had 30 students staring at us and listening eagerly to every word we said. It’s a lot of pressure. In fact, we made a prediction that I would faint and Julian would throw up in the middle of the lecture. Thankfully, our theories turned out to be incorrect since we ended up giving an informative lecture during which no major illnesses struck the lecturers J. Overall, it was a good experience and Julian and I have definitely made our first steps in our journey to becoming superstar lecturers. We still have much to do before we make it to a Michael Gordon lecturing level though…

SMS Group Mobitechno, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

After a series of elimination rounds, the students narrowed down their ideas to four well-thought-out SMS services. They presented their ideas to the class and received feedback from us as well as their peers. Based on this feedback, the students chose the one SMS service they felt was most viable and looked to further improve it.

The class seemed completely absorbed in the challenge; creating a unique SMS service that will fill a need here in Kenya. Students came in before class and stayed after class to get their service up and running. We were amazed at how motivated the students were to get a working demonstration of their service. In the end, the hard work paid off as all seven groups had awesome projects to present on Monday.

SMS Application Brainstorming Session, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

Today was an incredibly uplifting day for the team. We have been working very hard teaching, organizing, and preparing materials. In addition to Cory’s lecture on culling information from the web using Java (http, xml and html parsing), I gave a working demonstration of our SMS infrastructure. We set up an SMS server that given a world city, returns the current weather conditions or a weather forecast. The students were able to send SMSs directly to my computer, see them arrive, and receive the weather on their phone.

Much of Thursday was devoted to our SMS Brainstorming lab. We asked our students to brainstorm ideas for real-world SMS applications. We first asked the students to develop 10 ideas on their own. Next, we paired students and asked the pairs to prune their 20 ideas down to 10. Next, we asked the groups of 2 to form groups for 4, and further prune their ideas down to 4. Tomorrow, the groups of 4 will present their ideas to the class. The student group discussions were extremely lively. The students are very excited about the prospect of creating and deploying their applications. The team thrives off of our students’ enthusiasm.

Njeri Rionge on Entrepreneurship, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

On Thursday, Njeri Rionge presented a guest lecture covering entrepreneurship, business practices, and scalability. Ms. Rionge is Founder and Executive Director of Ignite Consulting. She was also instrumental in mobile operator Orange’s re-branding. Her entrepreneurial attitude was infectious. Our students asked questions regarding funding acquisition, business ideas, and pitches. She very successfully initiated our entrepreneurship unit.

It’s been a long but good week here at AITI. Students from the University of Nairobi arrived Monday and seem to have adjusted to the course very rapidly. We have, for now, stopped covering basic Java concepts and have moved on to SMS (texting) and HTTP. In the current lab, students will write a program to pull information from an online website and send it to users via SMS. Everyone seemed to like our version of the code, so we hope that they’re excited to start the lab as well as their own SMS applications.

To our students: thanks for a great (almost) three weeks. We’ve been really impressed by how hard you’ve worked and how dedicated you’ve been to the class. Keep it up.

We had our lecture today on exceptions and SMS applications. Many of the students are super excited to get their hands on developing SMS applications, because many people in Kenya have GSM phones that allow them to use their SMS composers. Michael went over the different types of SMS applications in class, and had the students begin to think about some of the SMS applications they could develop that other people would use. I’m really excited to hear what the students come up with, and can’t wait to help them deploy their applications. It’s going to be an exciting experience for many of us here in Kenya!

AITI 2009: First Student Mobile Application, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

On Tuesday, AITI had its first working mobile application. Samuel Kamochu, a student from JKUAT, developed a J2ME contact list application with persistent storage. Samuel came into the AITI program with good Java programming skills, and we encouraged him to skip ahead to mobile application development in J2ME, providing him with personal instructor and materials. Samuel also helps other students during lab time.

The Orb, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

After an excellent Japanese dinner on Sunday in Westlands.

Goaaaaaaaalllllllll!! (Kenya 2, Mozambique 1), originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

(Photo credit Michael Gordon) Saturday, we went to the Kenya vs. Mozambique football game, the first football game for many of us. We went downtown a few hours early to try and pick up some Kenya jerseys to wear, but could not find any shops that were selling them. Finding the bus to get to Moi stadium was quite an experience. We asked countless people for “Bus 45 to Kasarani” and people pointed us in every possible direction, except the correct one. Eventually we found a matatu, that was going to Kasarani so we hopped on. This matatu was awesome! Countless amenities, included a toothpick stuck into the roof for anyone’s general use (kidding!). We were already running a bit late, but the matatu drove quite efficiently (as in driving completely off-road, passing the miles of traffic). In retrospect, it was better we took the matatu, as the bus would never have been able to maneuver as the matatu did and get as to the stadium in a tenth of the time it should have taken.

We walked into the stadium just as Kenya scored a goal; an incredible welcome to the stadium. Mozambique tied it up later into the game, keeping us all on the edges of our seats. But Kenya was destined to win, in fact we heard from a number of people throughout the week that Kenya was favored. Kenya shot ahead with another goal (pictured) and held off Mozambique to win the game. We then finished off the day with a delicious dinner at Furasato, a Japanese restaurant recommended to us by our great friend Tess, who’s company we were lucky enough to share during her last weekend in Kenya. Our Sunday was spent preparing for the week, the most exciting week academically (we finally started SMS application development!)

-Zachary Stauber

AITI’s Visit to Google, originally uploaded by zekeafroid.

After class on Friday, the team traveled to Google’s Nairobi office. Our driver, John, had to battle Nairobi traffic to get us across town. Through a combination of travel in the oncoming lane, masterful traffic instincts, and traffic cop friends, we arrived only slightly late. The Google offices were very nice, situated in a posh building.

We had an informal meeting with almost the entire Google office. The attendants introduced themselves. Then we gave them a summary of the program, its goals, and the future vision. The groups had many questions for each other: “What is it like to go to MIT?”, “What type of work is being done in the Google office?”, “Do you keep in contact with the students from previous programs?”, “Is MIT nerdy?”, “What is the killer app that will get Kenyans on the Internet?”. The discussion ended on the topic of education in Kenya, and AITI’s experience that the students are more passive (less questioning) than in America. An important part of our job is to break this passiveness. We also asked if this passiveness adversely affects the rate in which Kenyans create Internet content. It was quite interesting hearing the Googlers thoughts regarding our program and Google’s vision for itself in Africa.