HP Russia offered fundamental support to a Summer School for Young Programmers in Novosibirsk which took place this summer. The school provides IT education for 80 students aged 10-16, running two-week courses that focus on a wide variety of IT programmes, together with presentations, conferences and workshops.
This is the third year running that HP has provided financial support and is in recognition of the high standards of teaching provided by the school and also of the benefits that the students receive as a result.
This year, the majority of the students came from Siberia, with some also from Kazakhstan and Canada. They were divided into groups in order to participate in workshops. These included parallel programming, graphics, computer games and computer languages. Each day, the students were given a task and a reward, in the form of an HP A826 Photosmart Printer, was given by HP to the overall winner who completed the best tasks at the end of the course. Additional prizes such as T-shirts, calculators and web cameras were also given by HP throughout the two weeks.
The students also got the chance to meet with HP Russia management: Owen Kemp, Managing Director, HP Russia, gave details on Cloud Computing and the qualifications required for joining IT companies; Irina Efremova, HP Corporate Marketing, gave a presentation on grant opportunities for young programmers; Igor Belousov from the HP Labs Open Innovation Office gave details on what IT could look like in ten years time and Karel Vavruska, HP Business Development, challenged students to try some hands-on computing by calculating the number p (3.141) by throwing matches on a sheet of paper and by calculating the number “e” (2.718) by dropping coins.
Karel comments: “For many of the students, this Summer School is a great opportunity to meet peers from other schools and to share their knowledge of IT. Their attendance at the school, which is well-known for providing such high standards of IT education, also stands them in good stead for entrance into university.
“For HP, the Summer School also provides a chance to increase our collaboration with educational establishments in Siberia,” Karel says. “We opened our office in Siberia just three years ago and we have already given a mobile classroom complete with notebook computers to this school. We also donated a mobile classroom to a separate school in Novosibirsk and I am pleased to say that Novosibirsk State University was the Russian winner of this year’s HP Technology for Teaching-Higher Education Initiative.”
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