Dev Day Yuma’s inaugural software coding event is in the books. Dev Day Yuma 2017 was held on Saturday, February 25, 2017 at Arizona Western College’s Schoening Center. An estimated 70+ Yuma-area high school students attended the event, representing virtually every high school in the Yuma area.
Participating students worked in small teams to develop game applications in the Scratch programming environment. A number of teams developed their games around one of four pre-developed exercises; many students improvised their own games or used their creativity to modify the provided exercises.
At lunch, students heard several guest speakers: Bob Cuckler of L5 Technologies, who discussed the software industry and career opportunities in software; Conrad Hernandez of Trax International, who showed a rip-roaring video on the exciting activities at Yuma Proving Ground; Sam Peffers of the University of Arizona Yuma, who talked about college-level education opportunities in Yuma, and Kevin Imes of the Southwest Technical Education District of Yuma (STEDY), who spoke of STEDY’s upcoming software certificate program. Yuma Deputy Mayor Gary Knight attended the lunch event.
Dev Day Yuma’s event was capped by an hour-long “show-and-tell” session, where a number of students presented the games they had developed during the day.
Student enthusiasm for the event seemed high. “I didn’t get much programming done today,” said one participant, “but I learned that I want to write software for a living.” Not a bad conclusion to Yuma’s first area-wide coding event.