This year at Byteworks we’ve been fortunate enough to acquire four or five more instructors for our Earn-A-Computer program.
This means that I’ll have enough time to start a Mentorship project with several students from previous Earn-A-Computer classes who showed willingness to learn new technologies and to work as a team.
The purpose of Byteworks’ Mentorship program is to further students’ technical knowledge and teach basic project management skills. I promise to blog about Byteworks’ Mentorship program at a later time. For now, I want to tell everyone about the awesomeness that is Fecba.
What is Fecba?
In case you couldn’t tell from the title, Fecba is a time-tracking system that will eventually replace Byteworks’ pen-and-paper approach to tracking volunteer hours. Currently, all Byteworks volunteers write down their hours on a clipboard in the shop. It’s a big chore at the end of the year when we total the amount of hours that volunteers spend at Byteworks.
In addition, there’s more than enough volunteers who do not track their time. If we make this app more available than the clipboard at Byteworks, hopefully more volunteers will report their hours. This will benefit us when applying for grants and spreading the word about our organization.
This is a classic “Scratch your own itch” problem. Students who contribute to the Fecba project will see our volunteers use their program every day and hopefully gain inspiration and motivation from peoples’ feedback. ‘Nuff said.
Planning, Design and Coding
There’s two main goals for this project: Learn and Accomplish. This means several things:
We will take time to learn how fundamental things work. In this case, Fecba will be a Web application that sits on top of a database. So we will learn things like HTTP, HTML and <gasp> SQL. It’s difficult to teach the new and awesome programming tools/techniques if students don’t know the old way of doing things and what makes the new stuff better. Therefore, we’ll code it the “old way” then make improvements using “the new way”.
We will have fun and enjoy working on the project. It’s much easier to stick to something if you enjoy doing it and have some skin in the game. The students picked the name “Fecba” and came up with the idea of using a command-line interface to enter hours. This is a cool twist and gives the application some personality.
We will get frequent feedback from users, and put the app into production with the minimal set of features needed. When students see their project being used, they will get a sense of accomplishment, and hopefully be inspired with more ideas for the app.
In the upcoming week, I’ll post more details about Fecba – stay tuned!