By Sabilah Mwanga
The IT Club organized and hosted a Python programming class, every Saturday for three weeks beginnig May 19, where participants were introduced to Python - a high-level general purpose programming language created Guido van Rossum in 1991.
Today, it is used by millions of people for various purposes such as testing microchips Intel Corp, powering Instagram, building video games with the PyGame library and developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Owning to its user-friendliness, Python has been used to create some of the most popular websites such as Google, YouTube, Instagram, Quora, and Spotify, and is also implemented in LibreOffice, which is common in our classroom laptops and computer labs. The programming class’ second module will be introduced later after the successful completion of the first module.
On Friday, June 8 at the Incubation and Innovation Center, the IT Club also held a Hardware Workshop for ten participating students, where they were taken through an introduction to Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms. Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronic objects. It consists of a microcontroller - which is a physical programmable circuit board - and software which runs on a computer used to write and upload computer code to the physical board.
During the workshop, the instructor Vishaal Ravalia illustrated how code written for Arduino can be used for the ubiquitous Light Emitting Diodes, whose real-world applications include traffic lights and vehicular indicator systems. The Arduino hardware and software was designed for anyone interested in creating interactive objects (such as with buttons, Light Emitting Diodes, motors, speakers, smartphones, television, etc.) or environments.
The club hopes the teaching modules will spur members to use these hardware technologies for their innovations.